The New Establishment

The Vanity Fair 100

Like the economy, *V.F.’*s annual ranking of the top 100 Information Age powers has been truly shaken up, with new blood emerging. Who’s in? Who’s out? Who’s top dog? Related: For many of the titans on the V.F. 100, power and influence are an enduring conferment. Meet the inductees to the lifetime Hall of Fame. Plus: The Go-to Gang, the Next Establishment, the Pit Stop, and the Bottomed Line.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: It’s hard to imagine a financial institution that has weathered the economic crisis as well as Goldman Sachs has. Wall Street’s most watched and talked-about erstwhile investment bank took just seven months to shake the government off its back—it repaid its tarp funds ($10 billion) in June—and return to doing what it does best: making money. Goldman’s second-quarter net income of $3.4 billion shocked even the most cynical observers, of which there were many, thanks to the firm’s insidious tentacles, which stretch from Wall Street to Washington. Nevertheless, as several of the Goldman chief’s contemporaries have seen their careers come to ignominious ends in the past 18 months—Lehman Brothers’ Dick Fuld, Bear Stearns’s Jimmy Cayne, Merrill Lynch’s Stanley O’Neal—Blankfein’s grip on power at his own firm has only gotten tighter.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS: Blankfein, 55, is the son of a Brooklyn postal worker.

BIG COOL FRIEND:Warren Buffett. The Oracle of Omaha stepped into the breach with an injection of $5 billion into Goldman in October 2008 in exchange for preferred shares that pay a 10 percent annual dividend.

NEMESIS:Rolling Stonewriter Matt Taibbi, who gathered every single conspiracy theory that has ever been uttered about Goldman into a July barn burner called “The Great American Bubble Machine,” in which he described the bank as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”

QUESTIONABLE-TASTE ALERT: Just days before reports surfaced in The New York Postof Blankfein calling for his bankers to put an end to conspicuous consumption and lay low, his wife, Laura, reportedly made a fuss in the Hamptons after she and another Goldman Sachs wife were asked to wait in line with other ticket holders before the doors opened for Super Saturday, a charity event for ovarian cancer.

SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF: In 2008, the firm earned $2.3 billion and paid a mere $14 million in taxes, an effective tax rate of 1 percent, the result of what Goldman calls “changes in geographic earnings mix.” Critics say this could be offshore tax havens, a charge that Goldman denies.

THE HITS KEEP COMING: Goldman faced another round of criticism in late August after The Wall Street Journal revealed that the bank’s analysts supply stock tips to their biggest spending clients, leaving their smaller investors in the dark.

ON THE RECORD: “We regret that we participated in the market euphoria and failed to raise a responsible voice.”

YEAR AHEAD: →
2. Steve Jobs

Apple

LAST YEAR: 4.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The world’s most iconic businessman makes some of the world’s most iconic products. Since retaking the reins of Apple in the late 1990s, Jobs has redefined the way we think about computers, music, and phones. His Macs are the computers of choice for anyone who can afford their high-end price tag. His iPods vaporized the album format but helped keep the music industry alive, and his iPhones are now the industry standard for high-end smartphones (he sold 5.2 million devices in a three-month stretch this year and has been steadily increasing its market share). Along the way, Jobs also found time to help create Pixar, the world’s most successful film studio, which, with 10 movies so far, has yet to produce a dud, or even a misfire. Up, the most recent, is another critical and commercial success.

__HEALTH WATCH:__Jobs, 54, is both a master showman and intensely private, which fuels endless speculation about his plans, his motives, and, more recently, his well-being. After months of speculation about his frail appearance and declining health, Jobs stepped away from his company in January to treat a “hormone imbalance”; later, news leaked that he had received a liver transplant. He’s supposedly recovering and is back in the office.

CRIB: After a five-year fight, the city of Woodside, California, has finally allowed Jobs to take down a 14-bedroom mansion he bought in 1984 but hasn’t lived in since the mid-90s. A Silicon Valley investor has agreed to harvest pieces of the building’s exterior.

__THE NEW NEW THING:__Technology handicappers are convinced that Apple’s next big product will be an “iTablet”—a touch-screen device that’s bigger than an iPhone and smaller than a Macbook and combines both machines’ functions.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Stores are struggling to get consumers to use their cash and credit cards, but Amazon’s stuff is still flying off its virtual shelves. In the midst of the economic meltdown late last year, the e-commerce giant said it had recorded its “best ever” holiday season. The biggest worry for the company is that it will struggle as consumers abandon physical versions of books, CDs, and movies for digital ones, but so far (see: Kindle), Bezos seems to be handling the switch ably.

BIG PURCHASE: Amazon spent some $900 million in July to buy Zappos.com, a Web-based shoe seller.

MAN-OF-THE-PEOPLE MOVE: Bezos, 45, logged a week working at an Amazon distribution center in Lexington, Kentucky.

__STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__How bad was the market meltdown? Bad enough for the planet’s greatest investor to suffer only his second down year in more than four decades, a result that prompted some critics to charge that Buffett had lost his touch.

BIG BOLD BETS: During the height of the global economic crisis, the 79-year-old investor almost single-handedly calmed the markets by making billion-dollar investments in Goldman Sachs ($5 billion), General Electric ($3 billion), and Swiss Re ($2.6 billion). Berkshire’s Goldman stake is now worth more than $9 billion.

__LATEST STAB AT IMMORTALITY:__The Oracle of Omaha is set to star in The Secret Millionaires Club, an online cartoon series aimed to help children learn about finance.

LITTLE BUDDY: Wang Chuanfu. Since investing $230 million in the Chinese entrepreneur’s high-tech company, BYD, last September, Buffett has seen his stake jump by more than 300 percent.

SHOULD BE EMBARRASSED ABOUT: Berkshire lost more than $6.8 billion last year trading credit-default swaps and other derivative contracts, instruments Buffett had derided as “financial weapons of mass destruction” in his 2003 annual letter to shareholders.

QUOTE: “Investors of all stripes were bloodied and confused, much as if they were small birds that had strayed into a badminton game.”

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: It’s hard to believe that Google turned 11 years old in September. Its stock has fallen from a peak of $714 in late 2007 to around $445 today, wiping out nearly $20 billion in paper wealth for its leadership triumvirate. The company has laid off 10,000 contract workers and even cut back on the operating hours at its famed free cafeterias. And Silicon Valley types gossip about the “Google brain drain,” as disillusioned talent has finally begun to defect from the vaunted company. Nonetheless, Google is still doing better than pretty much everyone else in the battered economy. And as the Obama administration revived the long-forgotten notions of anti-trust, Google’s dominance became the subject of three separate federal investigations, including one into allegations that the Google and Apple boards have become overly entwined, which prompted Schmidt, 53, to relinquish his seat on Apple’s board.

WAS ANYONE REALLY FOOLED?: In response to the probes by the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission, Google launched an unpersuasive P.R. campaign to portray the Internet giant as vulnerable and not evil.

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS: Washington’s interest in regulating Google is countered by the company’s close ties to the new administration: Schmidt serves on Obama’s advisory council on science and technology and sat next to the president during a C.E.O. powwow in February. Google’s former head lobbyist Andrew McLaughlin is now the nation’s “deputy chief technology officer.” Google was the third-biggest source of corporate donations to Obama’s campaign, and 15 Google executives donated $166,000 for the inauguration.

DÉCOR: Schmidt’s office has a seat from a B-52 bomber, a gift from Brin, 35, and Page, 36.

HEALTH WATCH: Brin said last September that he has a genetic mutation that increases his risk of Parkinson’s, which his mother, Eugenia (a former nasa computer engineer), has developed.

THORN IN THEIR SIDE: Their YouTube unit struggled to sell advertising, reportedly losing millions of dollars a year from the cost of streaming videos. The basic problem: advertisers don’t want their ad to appear next to a video of a teen in a thong.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Fink, 56, has emerged as one of Wall Street’s newest power players in the wake of the housing bust. His BlackRock Inc. became the world’s largest money manager with the $13.5 billion purchase of Barclays Global Investors in June and now has $2.7 trillion in assets under management.

GOVERNMENT RELATIONS: The Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department have tasked BlackRock with managing $30 billion of assets formerly owned by Bear Stearns and $100 billion from A.I.G. The firm is also one of four co-managers of a $500 billion fund that is buying distressed mortgages on behalf of the Treasury.

SARTORIAL EXTRAVAGANCE: An A. Lange & Sohne watch.

CELEBRITY RELATIONS: Fink has a framed platinum CD by Maroon 5 in his office. He’s an investor in Octone Records, the Grammy-winning band’s record label. The band played at BlackRock’s 2006 holiday party.

SHOULD BE EMBARRASSED ABOUT: In December 2007, Fink told a Goldman Sachs conference that the economy was unlikely to fall into recession in 2008 and encouraged attendees to take on more—not less—risk during the year.

SHOULD BE GRATEFUL FOR: Fink was a contender to take over the C.E.O. slot at a stumbling Merrill Lynch in 2007 but was passed over in favor of John Thain.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
7. Rupert Murdoch
News Corp.

LAST YEAR: 2.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The respectability that Murdoch paid billions to buy with The Wall Street Journal was jeopardized by the skullduggery of one of his London tabloids: The Guardian suggested that Murdoch’s News Group newspapers illegally hacked into the phones of numerous public figures and paid $1.6 million in settlements to buy the silence of several individuals. The News of the World was accused of “violating the privacy” of celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, and Nigella Lawson. News Corp. has denied the report.

STAB AT IMMORTALITY: The media lord is leading the charge to make consumers open their wallets for online news content. He intends to convert his Web sites to a pay model by next summer.

DIGITAL DEALINGS: At the Sun Valley mogulfest, Murdoch, 78, denied that he wanted to buy Twitter, saying no one has come up with a way for it to make money. He also said he won’t sell his money-losing MySpace social-networking Web site, which has been eclipsed in trendiness by both Twitter and Facebook. He cut some 400 jobs (or 30 percent) of MySpace’s U.S. staff, and announced a plan to cut another 300 overseas.

BLOOD FEUD: His newspapers have delighted in covering the marital mishaps of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who doubled the taxes on Murdoch’s Italian satellite television service.

RECENT ACT OF DO-GOODERY: Pledged $5.5 million to New York City’s Harlem Village Academies, a network of schools for grades 5 through 11.

YEAR AHEAD: →
8. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
Actors, activists

LAST YEAR: 9.

__STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__The tabloid-haunted, globe-trotting couple reminded us that they both canreally act with Pitt’s Oscar-nominated performance in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Jolie’s in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling.

__VOX POPULI:__A campaign formed on the Web to recruit Pitt to run for New Orleans mayor even though Pitt hasn’t lived there the requisite five years—Pitt, 45, and Jolie, 34, spent $3.5 million for a French Quarter house in 2007. He isn’t even registered to vote there, and when asked by the Todayshow’s Ann Curry whether he would enter the election, he replied, “I’m running on the gay-marriage, no-religion, legalization-and-taxation-on-marijuana platform. I don’t have a chance.”

BRAGGING RIGHTS: Jolie’s $27 million in earnings put her atop this year’s Forbes “Celebrity 100” list and ahead of erstwhile romantic rival Jennifer Aniston (who was quoted in Vogue as saying that it was “uncool” for Jolie to talk about how her relationship with Pitt developed while he was married to Aniston). Pitt, meanwhile, scored box office success with Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

LATEST ACTS OF DO-GOODERY: The couple’s foundation donated $1 million to the United Nations to help the hundreds of thousands of refugees from violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It also donated $1 million for a cancer center in Springfield, Missouri, named after Pitt’s mother, Jane. Pitt gave $100,000 to the No on Prop 8 campaign in California and said that he and Jolie won’t get married until gay people can, too.

__YEAR AHEAD:__→
9. Jamie Dimon
J.P. Morgan Chase

LAST YEAR: 21.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Dimon, 53, has emerged as one of the most powerful bankers in the country, if not the world. J.P. Morgan Chase, with more than $2 trillion in assets, is gaining market share in every one of its businesses as rivals suffer. On a personal level, Dimon has emerged from the crisis with an even higher profile than he had before, something few other bankers can say. In July, The New York Times ran a front-page story titled in washington, one bank chief still holds sway. That banker was Dimon.

BIG MOVES: Snapped up Bear Stearns in March 2008 for a fire-sale price of $10 a share and picked up failed Seattle-based bank Washington Mutual for $1.9 billion six months later.

BIG IMPORTANT FRIEND: Warren Buffett. After Dimon wrote a particularly impressive annual letter to J.P. Morgan’s shareholders, Buffett wrote him a letter congratulating him on it.

MANAGEMENT TOOL: After a long day, Dimon will pull an expensive bottle of wine out of his personal wine stash and invite one or two employees into his office to share it with him.

WEEKEND CENTER OF GRAVITY: The family’s $17 million weekend house on a 30-acre estate in Bedford Corners in New York’s Westchester County.

SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE: Dimon’s spitfire wife, Judy, cornered one of Barney Frank’s staffers during Obama’s inaugural celebrations and demanded that they stop vilifying banks to score political points.

SIDE JOB: Media mogul. Current plans to bring Reader’s Digest out of bankruptcy will make J.P. Morgan Chase the publishing company’s biggest equity holder. Combined with its involvement in American Media (Starmagazine) and its 12 percent stake in Source Interlink Media (Motor Trend), Dimon now oversees a publishing empire that generates more than $5 billion in revenue—bigger than Time Inc.

BRAGGING RIGHTS: In the first six months of 2009, J.P. Morgan Chase’s investment bank led Wall Street’s rankings in the most important fund-raising categories.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
10. Bernard Arnault

LVMH

LAST YEAR: 13.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Even though the recession meant that lots of people scaled back and splurged less on LVMH’s champagne (brands include Moët & Chandon, Dom Pérignon, Veuve Clicquot) last year, the $22 billion luxury conglomerate nonetheless reported a sales increase and kept its profits stable through the strength of its fashion and cosmetics lines: its flagship brand, Louis Vuitton, stuck with its no-discounts policy through the economic downturn—and enjoyed double-digit growth during the hypercompetitive Christmas quarter. Arnault, 60, said that LVMH wouldn’t cut advertising spending this year, and that it would continue to develop its top brands to gain market share.

IMPERIAL EXPANSION: Arnault opened Louis Vuitton’s 28th store in China earlier this year, saying: “China will be the No. 1 economic power in the world within 30 years.”

YEAR AHEAD: ↗

Steven Spielberg
DreamWorks Studios

LAST YEAR: 14.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The departure of his close friend David Geffen left Spielberg, 62, running DreamWorks together with longtime colleague Stacey Snider, who is now his partner. They relaunched the studio by splitting with Paramount and walking away from a publicly announced deal with Universal for an even better one with Disney, which will distribute the 30 movies DreamWorks plans to make over six years. And the pair finalized an $825 million financing deal for movie-making. The funding includes $325 million from J.P. Morgan, $325 million from their business partner, Indian billionaire Anil Ambani, and $175 million from Disney.

SIDE JOB: Video-game impresario. He collaborated on the award-winning Boom Blox game for Nintendo’s Wii console and made a personal appearance at the E3 conference in L.A. in June to help Microsoft show off new features of its Xbox.

BIG DEAL: In May, DreamWorks announced plans for a film about the life of Martin Luther King Jr. through a deal with his son Dexter—but faced blowback from King’s other children, M.L.K. III and Bernice, who’ve been mired in a family feud with Dexter over control of the King estate.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Before Pixar released Upearlier this year, Wall Street and some industry watchers feared that a cartoon about a cranky 78-year-old (voiced by Ed Asner) would flop and bring down the share price of parent company Disney. Instead, Up became Pixar’s 10th straight blockbuster, grossing more than $335 million worldwide and extending the most successful streak in the history of film. Its director, Docter, 41, was one of the animation studio’s earliest employees and had collaborated with Lasseter on its first fully animated feature, Toy Story. Lasseter, 52, also scored a success with the 3-D doggy picture Bolt, the first feature under his watch as chief creative officer at Walt Disney Animation Studios. (He splits his time between Pixar in Northern California and Disney in Southern.)

GLOBAL BONA FIDES:Up kicked off the Cannes Film Festival in May. In September, the 3-D versions of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where Lasseter, Docter, Bird, 51, and Stanton, 43, all received Golden Lion lifetime-achievement awards. Pixar plans to open a new studio, in Vancouver, in the fall.

SUB-OPTIMAL USE OF GENIUS: A coming spate of sequels—Cars 2, Toy Story 3,and a rumoredMonsters Inc. 2—in an effort to release more movies.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
13. Ralph Lauren

Polo Ralph Lauren

LAST YEAR: 15.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: While the recession lowered profits at his $5-billion-a-year Polo empire, Lauren—sitting atop an $800 million pile of cash—accelerated his expansion in Asia, and launched his first-ever line of luxury watches, which retail for $9,000 to $70,000 (for a limited-edition platinum timepiece). In July Polo signed a deal to dress the American Olympic team for the Winter Games in Vancouver in 2010.

COMPENSATION WATCH: The 70-year-old’s total pay package fell 40 percent, from $34 million in 2008 to $20 million in 2009.

FAMILY RELATIONS: His younger son, David, is Polo’s senior vice president of marketing, while firstborn Andrew produced the documentary *This Is Not a Robbery,*which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
14. Michael Bloomberg

Mayor, New York City; Bloomberg L.P.

LAST YEAR: 12.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Running the world’s financial capital is a tough job under normal conditions; running it when the world’s financial structure is wobbling is exponentially harder. But Bloomberg wants to keep at it and has convinced lawmakers to adjust the city’s term-limits law so he can run for a third time. At press time, he was favored to win, but by a narrowing margin.

BUMPS IN THE ROAD: The cratered economy also poses a problem for Bloomberg’s namesake business: it’s hard to sell $1,900-a-month subscriptions for his data service to vaporized Wall Street firms.

HOBBY: Golf. Mayor Mike, 67, picked up his clubs late in life and started as an 18 handicap; it has since come down.

BÊTE NOIRE: Cars. Bloomberg’s administration has tried a series of gambits to cut down on the number of motorized vehicles in Manhattan. The latest: handing over big swaths of Broadway to pedestrians, creating exhaust-filled yet surprisingly pleasant parks.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The discipline and shrewdness of Obama’s inner circle helped win him the White House—and then take swift action to rescue the economy. Emanuel, the former congressional samurai, played a crucial, behind-the-scenes role in getting Congress to pass the $787 billion stimulus package. Jarrett, the erstwhile corporate executive, serves as a key liaison to the business community. Former Chicago political columnist and campaign guru extraordinaire Axelrod (known as “Ax” in the West Wing) masterminds the message strategy. And Rouse, 63, a veteran Capitol Hill staffer who had run Obama’s Senate office, brings decades of Washington savvy to the team.

FLOOR PLAN: Axelrod’s office, while tiny, is the closest to the Oval Office—and has a photo of his favorite Chicago deli, Manny’s. Emanuel’s office has precisely aligned files and a credenza with a wooden nameplate: “Undersecretary for Go Fuck Yourself.” Jarrett works from the second-floor digs formerly occupied by Karl Rove and Hillary Clinton.

BEHIND THE SCENES: A July New York Times Magazine story implied that Axelrod, 54, and Emanuel, 49, chafe at the clout Jarrett derives from her sibling-like relationship with both the president and the First Lady.

GLOBAL BONA FIDES: Jarrett, 53, lived in Iran and London as a child, returning to public school in Chicago speaking British-accented English (as well as Farsi and French), then as a teenager spent her summers traveling to Ghana, Nigeria, and Egypt.

LEGEND HAS IT: At age 13, a precocious Axelrod sold buttons and bumper stickers on New York City streets for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗

Larry Ellison
Oracle

LAST YEAR: 37.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: In April the software titan agreed to acquire Sun Microsystems, a once-great Silicon Valley giant, after Sun’s talks broke down with IBM. The $7.4 billion bid is considered Ellison’s riskiest deal ever. Since 2005 he has spent around $30 billion on 55 acquisitions, and he has taken advantage of his piles of cash to go bargain hunting during the economic downturn. He also announced Oracle’s first-ever dividend—which, since he’s a huge stockholder, essentially means giving himself an estimated $230 million windfall this year on top of nearly $85 million in salary and perks.

LEGAL WIN: Prevailed in his two-year battle to force Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli, holder of the America’s Cup sailing title, to accept a challenge from Ellison’s BMW Oracle team, which has a way cool 90-foot trimaran. The race is planned for February.

__PARTY WATCH:__Ellison, 65, hosted actors Orlando Bloom and Colin Firth on his 453-foot yacht, Rising Sun, which he owns with David Geffen, during the Cannes Film Festival.

DODGED A BULLET WHEN: A federal judge recently dismissed a shareholder lawsuit against Ellison and his company. Eight years ago the same judge ruled that he had deliberately destroyed e-mails potentially relevant to claims that he had misled shareholders.

__YEAR AHEAD:__↗
17. Steve Ballmer
Microsoft

LAST YEAR: 16.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The bad news: Microsoft is still battling Apple, Google, male-patterned baldness, and anti-trust regulators—and now the economy, which forced it to enact its first mass layoffs in its 34-year history. The (could be) good news: a year and a half after he first tried to buy Yahoo, for more than $40 billion, Ballmer finally struck an agreement with the floundering Web giant, via a complicated search deal.

EVIDENCE OF OBSESSIVE BEHAVIOR: Microsoft has lost billions trying to get into the Web business, but Ballmer, 53, won’t stop trying. In addition to the Yahoo deal, he has rolled out Bing, a would-be Google competitor, backed by a relentless $100 million ad campaign.

QUOTE: “Nobody gets it.... It stuns me that people haven’t figured it out.”—Ballmer’s defense of the Yahoo deal, which was panned by Wall Street.

YEAR AHEAD: ↘
18. Nicolas Sarkozy
President of France

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The conservative president, elected two years ago with the slogan “Work more to earn more,” intended to drag France further into American-style capitalism. But he checked his free-market impulses during the onslaught of the global economic downturn, when ample government spending looked smart after all: by swiftly enacting a stimulus plan, Sarkozy ensured that France was hurt less than other Western European nations.

ACCESSORY: Rolex watches.

CRISIS MANAGEMENT: Sarkozy ended a “boss-napping” at a Caterpillar plant in Grenoble by promising to keep the site from closing.

SPOUSAL RELATIONS: Sarkozy, 54, watched as wife Carla Bruni sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” and played guitar in a Radio City Music Hall tribute to Nelson Mandela on his 91st birthday in July. But earlier, in May, after a public backlash, he backed down from announced plans to spend a night with Bruni on the Côte d’Azur rather than attend the French Cup soccer finals.

LEGISLATIVE MANEUVERS: Pushing a bill to “abolish Sunday” (i.e., allow more stores to open) and supporting a potential ban on wearing burkas (which he called “a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement”) in public.

YEAR AHEAD: →
19. Bill Clinton

Clinton Foundation

LAST YEAR: 11.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Clinton was spoofed by Saturday Night Live for his seemingly insincere efforts to support Obama’s candidacy. But then he became a team player, clearing the way for Hillary to become secretary of state by agreeing to disclose the names of 200,000 donors who together gave more than $492 million to his foundation. In February, Clinton went rogue again when he advised that the new president needed to show greater confidence in the economy.

POLITICAL RELATIONS: In August, Clinton, 63, was dispatched to North Korea to negotiate the release of the two U.S. journalists who were caught sneaking into the country in March and consequently sentenced to 12 years of hard labor.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: Clinton appeared with George W. Bush in front of an audience of 6,000 in Toronto. Bush said that his mother, Barbara, considers Clinton like a son because of the time he spends [doing charity work] with her husband, George H. W. Bush.

HOLLYWOOD RELATIONS: Dennis Quaid will play Clinton in The Special Relationship, a movie written by Peter Morgan (who was nominated for an Oscar for The Queen) about the president’s dealings with British prime minister Tony Blair.

YEAR AHEAD: →
20. François-Henri Pinault
PPR

LAST YEAR: 17.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Rising sales at top fashion lines such as Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, and Bottega Veneta helped PPR’s revenues increase nearly 6 percent last year, to $30 billion, and profits rose 0.2 percent, to $1.2 billion, despite tough times at its French retail chains for music, books, and furniture, where PPR planned to cut 1,200 jobs—and signaled there are more cost cuts to come.

MARITAL RELATIONS: To celebrate his wedding to actress Salma Hayek, with whom he has a daughter, stars such as Bono, Penélope Cruz, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, and Woody Harrelson came to Venice in April for a weekend of festivities that included a masked ball and a party at the historic Teatro La Fenice opera house.

THORN IN HIS SIDE: Aggressive demonstrators who targeted Pinault, 47, reportedly threw an egg at the C.E.O. in protest of job cuts. On another occasion, riot police had to clear away employees who had surrounded Pinault’s car for nearly an hour.

LATEST ACT OF DO-GOODERY: Hayek and designer Stella McCartney were appointed to the board of PPR’s new foundation for women whose various missions include supporting social entrepreneurs and anti-violence efforts.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗

John Malone
Liberty Media

LAST YEAR: 86.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Ascendant again. Formerly the most powerful man in cable TV, Malone, 68, is now spending some of his time in the air. Last year he acquired a controlling stake in satellite-television leader DirecTV; this year he bailed out wobbly satellite-radio outfit Sirius XM. Though he was once seen as a Darth Vader figure by critics, Malone’s gravitas and longevity now make him one of the industry’s wise men. Or, in the words of a competitor: “Goes without saying, but Malone is a god.”

MOGUL RELATIONS: Malone gave Rupert Murdoch a new No. 2—his DirecTV C.E.O., Chase Carey—and told him he owes him a favor.

FILE UNDER “IRONY”: Malone, a passionate foe of taxes and government regulation, agreed to pay a $1.4 million fine to settle a civil complaint brought by the Federal Trade Commission.

QUOTE: “Advertising is going to be insufficient as a revenue stream to support the breadth and depth of the quality that the public wants,” said Malone, at the All Things Digital conference, explaining why you’re going to have to pay to watch TV on the Web one day.

YEAR AHEAD: ↑
22. Al Gore
Generation Investment Management

__LAST YEAR:__10.

__STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__Gore is listened to more avidly in Washington, D.C., now than when he held office. He has met with Obama and Biden, and he talks frequently with congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and with energy chief Carol Browner. He was even treated with a modicum of respect by Republicans when he testified to the Senate in favor of the stimulus package and the proposed federal cap-and-trade bill for carbon emissions. Gore, 61, will bolster his crusade for renewable energy this November with his next surefire best-seller, Our Choice, a book printed on 100 percent recycled paper. But despite his tireless efforts, Gore’s truth remains too inconvenient for most Americans: surveys show that 20 percent agree with him about climate change, 20 percent strongly oppose him, and the remaining majority are confused, disengaged, or only mildly concerned.

__EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY FLAWED TACTICS:__In an article in the journal Environment, American University communications professor Matthew Nisbet argued that Gore’s focus on fear and crisis could be helping the other side by reinforcing “the partisan divide” on the climate-change issue, since critics can easily dismiss his doomsday scenarios as liberal “alarmism.” Nisbet also said that Gore’s language of fear can lead to “a sense of fatalism” among the public especially when they haven’t been told specifically what they can do to respond to the catastrophic threat.

CRISIS MANAGEMENT: After two American reporters for his politics- and youth-oriented news channel, Current TV, were detained in North Korea, Gore silently took the reigns in a governmental effort to bring the women home. Gore refrained from speaking publicly about the humanitarian mission until the journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, had returned safely to the U.S. in early August. Upon their arrival, he addressed the media on the families’ behalf, and although it was former president Bill Clinton who visited with Kim Jong II, Gore’s efforts in helping to arrange the release were described by both President Obama and the journalists’ families as “tireless.”

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
23. Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook

LAST YEAR: 25.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Zuckerberg’s company seems to have graduated from “Internet trend du jour” to “real deal” status: it now has more than 250 million users worldwide and it intends to increase its staff by as much as 50 percent this year. Facebook still needs to figure out how to turn that audience into a business, but the 25-year-old C.E.O. bought himself more time in May when Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment group, purchased $200 million worth of preferred shares.

EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY DIMINISHED STAYING POWER: Digital Sky values the company at $10 billion, a steep drop from the $15 billion Microsoft arrived at when it invested $240 million in 2007.

BIG MOVE: In August, Zuckerberg paid about $50 million to buy FriendFeed, a social media aggregator, and started testing “Facebook Lite,” a much leaner version of the current social-networking site.

BIG COOL FRIEND: Marc Andreessen, a former Web wunderkind himself, who joined Facebook’s board in 2008, is more investor than competitor—the social-network service he co-founded in 2004, Ning, is regarded by Facebook as a “complementary platform.”

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: While the combination of William Morris and the Endeavor Agency presents industry powerhouse CAA with a more formidable adversary, Lourd and his partners, including Kevin Huvane and Richard Lovett, still sit atop Hollywood’s most powerful agency: Spielberg, Clooney, Streep, Aniston, Will Smith, and LeBron James are all clients. And Lourd, 48, is on his way to filling Lew Wasserman’s old shoes.

BIG COOL FRIEND: Barry Diller. Lourd has been a director of Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp since 2005.

__POLITICAL RELATIONS:__Lourd held a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser attended by Michelle Obama at his Los Angeles home last September.

YEAR AHEAD: ↑
25. Evan Williams and Biz Stone
Twitter

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Twitter is either the quintessential start-up success story of the last technology bubble or the quintessential start-up hype story of the last technology bubble. For now, the service, which lets users broadcast short, not always pithy comments, is a growth story. A year ago, it had a couple million users; now it has upwards of 30 million. Revenues: next to none. But it’s working on that: In August, Stone, 35, said that Twitter would launch “paid accounts,” which will give companies that subscribe data on how successful the micro-blogging service is for them.

__CELEBRITY SHOUT-OUTS:__Twitter is perfect for famous people, since it gives them the chance to shout whatever they want, directly at their admirers. Torch carriers include Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, Shaq, George Lucas, Lance Armstrong, and the CNN newsroom.

NAME GAME: Stone, 35, was born Christopher Isaac Stone, but as a kid pronounced it “Bizibur.” The name Biz stuck.

EARLIER CLAIM TO FAME: Williams, 37, who grew up on a Nebraska farm, built blog-creation platform Blogger and sold it to Google. Plenty of people think he’ll eventually do the same with Twitter.

__FAD WATCH:__Teenagers claim to be uninterested in Twitter. The site’s explosive growth is being driven by an unlikely demographic: Adults.

YEAR AHEAD: ↓

Jerry Bruckheimer

Jerry Bruckheimer Films

LAST YEAR: 24.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The movie studios are tightening their belts and negotiations are getting tougher, but this year the action-oriented producer released Confessions of a Shopaholic and G-Force; wrapped big-budget films Prince of Persiaand The Sorcerer’s Apprentice; persuaded Johnny Depp to sign on to Pirates of the Caribbean 4 and The Lone Ranger(both are in development); bought the rights to the best-selling book Horse Soldiers; produced TV shows for CBS, ABC, HBO, and TNT; and hired two sharp young executives to run his video-game company, Jerry Bruckheimer Games.

BOX OFFICE NOT AS USUAL: After sitting in development for eight years, the ill-timed Shopaholic grossed just $44 million domestically—which is less than what his National Treasuresequel made on its debut weekend.

BUMPS IN THE ROAD: A stunt driver crashed a Ferrari into a Times Square building during the filming of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, injuring two pedestrians. Two days later an S.U.V. accident sent nine crew members to the hospital, leaving insiders wondering if the movie is cursed.

GOOD DEED: This spring Bruckheimer, 64, and his wife, Linda, gave the commencement address at Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky. His message: Don’t think that your degree means you are going to take over the business world tomorrow. “It takes really hard work to make it today,” he says. “The harder you work, the luckier you get.”

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
27. J. J. Abrams

Producer, writer, director

NEW ENTRY.

__STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__The success of his second film, Star Trek, let the longtime TV whiz kid (creator of Felicity, Lost,Alias,andFringe) prove that his big-screen directorial debut, Mission: Impossible III, which grossed $395 million worldwide, wasn’t just a fluke or a testament to the star power of Tom Cruise (who called Abrams “a creative juggernaut”). The prince of sci-fi is one of the highest-paid writer-producers in Hollywood, with a reported $55 million worth of deals from Paramount (for film) and Warner Bros. (for TV).

WHEELS: A Segway scooter (a gift from Cruise) and a Toyota Prius that replaced his Porsche.

QUIRK: He won’t ride escalators at airports.

EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLE OVERABUNDANCE OF TALENT: He composed and recorded the theme songs for Felicity,Alias, and Lost—and he’s also a cartoonist, puzzle-maker, and puppeteer.

__THORN IN HIS SIDE:__The 78-year-old William Shatner, who criticized Abrams for allegedly not asking him to do a cameo in *Star Trek.*Abrams, 43, disputed his claims, telling Entertainment Weekly: “We did try” to get Shatner involved.

YEAR AHEAD: ↑
28. Desirée Rogers
White House social secretary

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Bringing glamour and energy to her role as White House social secretary, the Harvard M.B.A. sees herself as keeper of “the best brand on earth: the Obama brand.” She has infused what she calls “the people’s house” with a younger, hipper, and artsier spirit through a flurry of events such as its first-ever “poetry jam.” She made room for a dance floor in the State Dining Room so the nation’s governors—and the president—could join a conga line as Earth, Wind & Fire performed.

FASHION SENSE: Elegantly attired in Chloé, Jil Sander, or Thakoon, Rogers, 50, was profiled by Vogue—and sat next to its editor, Anna Wintour, at New York’s runway shows.

FITNESS REGIME: Jumping rope, yoga.

WOMAN-OF-THE-PEOPLE MOVE: Using the Internet to distribute more than 30,000 tickets to the White House Easter Egg Roll instead of forcing the masses to wait on line outside for hours.

ROOTS: The New Orleans native is a descendant of a Creole voodoo priestess—and she has been queen of the Zulu Mardi Gras krewe.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
29. Judd Apatow

Writer, director, producer

LAST YEAR: 58.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: In his third directorial outing, Funny People, the king of “bromedy” expanded his range of comedic subject matter from boyish immaturity to, well, death. And although the film took the top spot at the box office its opening weekend, grossing $23.4 million, it opened softer than expected and will probably not earn back its $75 million budget. But because Apatow, 41, has proved that blockbuster hits can come from raunchy (but sweet) male-bonding films made for reasonable budgets without top-dollar star power, his influence is manifest in a wave of movies from other filmmakers such as *The Hangover; I Love You, Man; Zack and Miri Make a Porno;*and Humpday.

HOBBY: Collects autographs (from Steve Martin to François Truffaut).

SUSPICIOUSLY ARTSY MOVE:Funny People includes vérité home-video footage that Apatow shot of his own daughter (Maude singing “Memory” at a school recital) and of ex-roommate Adam Sandler (before either he or Apatow became famous).

LEGEND HAS IT: When he first saw actress Leslie Mann on the set of the 1996 comedy The Cable Guy, which he produced, he said (prophetically), “There goes the future Mrs. Apatow,” though she doesn’t recall meeting him.

TRUE CONFESSION: Told Playboy that he has never been good in bed.

YEAR AHEAD: →
30. Mike Duke
Wal-Mart Stores

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: With annual revenue of $405 billion, two million employees, and more than 7,000 stores worldwide, Walmart is more akin to a country than a company, and now the grand responsibility of running the behemoth falls to Duke, who took over from H. Lee Scott Jr. in February. The recession is playing into Walmart’s strength as a discount retailer. First-quarter sales rose 3.8 percent while profits were flat. And flat is the new up.

MAN-OF-THE-PEOPLE MOVE: Part of the $4.1 million Wal-Mart spent lobbying in the first half of 2009 was in support of Obama’s health-care-reform proposal that would require employers to provide health-care insurance to employees, a major break from the efforts of other large companies.

NON-MAN-OF-THE-PEOPLE MOVE: Another portion of that $4.1 million was dedicated to its continuing effort to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would facilitate unionizing efforts.

CLAIM TO FAME: Duke, 60, introduced the “one door per store” distribution system that reduced the number of trucks on the road as well as the required docking space at each store. In a company where minuscule changes can mean big profit swings, the move catapulted Duke to a position overseeing all of the company’s U.S. stores.

OVER-THE-TOP MOVE: At Walmart’s annual shareholders meeting in June, Ben Stiller was master of ceremonies, Michael Jordan made an appearance, and Miley Cyrus provided musical entertainment. Other performers: Smokey Robinson and Kris Allen, winner of the most recent American Idol.

GREEN BONA FIDES: In July the retailer unveiled plans to give every single product it carries an environmental rating, which will tabulate the full environmental “cost” of making the product. The retailer is also trying to create “zero waste” stores and sells more than 100 million compact fluorescent lightbulbs a year.

QUOTE:“Vitamins do well during a recession. People say, ‘I can take vitamins, which are not expensive, and stay healthy.’”

YEAR AHEAD: ↑

Gao Xiqing
China Investment Corp.

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The president of the Chinese government’s $200 billion investment fund showed his long-term confidence in the American economy by holding tightly to the huge stakes he had taken in Morgan Stanley (a $5 billion bet) and Blackstone ($3 billion) before things went from bad to worse on Wall Street.

BIG-MOUTH ALERT: During an interview with *60 Minutes,*the 56-year-old addressed criticisms that C.I.C., like other “sovereign wealth funds,” isn’t “transparent” enough in the public disclosures it makes about its investments, which has provoked the I.M.F. to create new guidelines. Speaking perhaps too bluntly, Gao said that the I.M.F.’s actions were “politically stupid.”

PATH TO POWER: Gao received a law degree from Duke and practiced at Richard Nixon’s old law firm, Mudge Rose Guthrie, before returning home to help create China’s stock exchange and manage its social-security fund.

__FAMILY HISTORY:__His father, a Red Army officer under Mao, was jailed for five years during the Cultural Revolution, and Gao himself feared imprisonment, spent nearly two years homeless as a teenager, and worked on a railroad-building gang and in a munitions factory.

LATEST ACT OF DO-GOODERY: Took a 5,000-mile train ride with his six-year-old son to visit the poorest areas of Tibet and Mongolia, where he pays for scholarships for children.

__YEAR AHEAD:__↑
32. Robert Iger
Disney

LAST YEAR: 35.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Wall Street worries that Disney’s theme parks will be pummeled in coming months, as cash-strapped tourists stay home, but its Pixar studio has yet to produce a dud (as many expected Up might be). Meanwhile, Iger overruled the protests of his lieutenants and signed ABC to a deal with Hulu, the Web-video joint venture formed by Fox and NBC. (Some critics of Hulu say it undermines traditional TV economics.)

MOGUL RELATIONS: Disney considered but passed on a chance to invest in the Huffington Post, where Iger’s wife, Willow Bay, is a senior editor and equity shareholder.

BIG COOL PAL: Apple C.E.O.—and largest single Disney shareholder—Steve Jobs. “I consider Bob Iger a friend. I don’t have a lot of friends.”

EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY OBSESSIVE BEHAVIOR: An inveterate exerciser—every profile seems to dutifully note his early-morning wake-up and workout routine—Iger, 58, still went on a diet last fall, dropping 13 pounds.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
33. Ronald Perelman

MacAndrews & Forbes

LAST YEAR: 26.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Perelman will invest in just about anything if the price is right. Over his varied career, he has owned a cigar company, a comic-book company, a camping-gear company, and a maker of “BioArmor” to protect humans from bioterrorism. But cosmetics-maker Revlon has always been his true love, with a relationship that dates back to 1985. In 2008, that relationship blossomed again, as Revlon reported its first profitable year in more than a decade.

BIG SALE: Perelman sold his 190-foot yacht, Ultima III, and took delivery of a new yacht, C2.

SIDE PROJECT: In June, Perelman, 66, and co-investors Jon Bon Jovi, Renée Zellweger, and Larry Gagosian reopened the Blue Parrot, a taco-and-margarita joint in East Hampton, after a nearly four-year hiatus.

LITTLE BUDDY: Tamara Mellon. Revlon added the Jimmy Choo founder to its board in August 2008.

SARTORIAL EXTRAVAGANCE: A watch designed by Richard Mille, whose timepieces go for anywhere from $42,000 to $1.4 million.

MOGUL MISHAP: Last year, Perelman agreed to pay $80 million to settle decade-old litigation with the comic-book publisher formerly called Marvel Entertainment Group.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
34. Bono

U2, Elevation Partners

LAST YEAR: 36.

__STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__The global activist and high-tech venture capitalist somehow found time to do justice to his day job as front man for the rock band U2. After two years of recording in London, New York, Dublin, Fez, and the South of France, the band released its long-awaited album, the experimental and eclectic No Line on the Horizon, which received enthusiastic reviews and debuted at No. 1 in 30 nations. Then, in June, U2 began schlepping a giant stage installation around the world for its “360° Tour.”

GROOMING SECRET: Wore eyeliner at the Grammy Awards.

WHEELS: Gray ethanol-powered Maserati Quattroporte.

THORN IN HIS SIDE: Songs from U2’s new album were posted early on the Internet by a fan who recorded them when Bono blasted the music from his villa on the French Riviera.

MOGUL RELATIONS: While Bono, 49, used to be tight with Apple’s Steve Jobs, he has been doing deals lately with the iPhone’s biggest rivals: his Elevation Partners venture-capital fund put another $100 million into Palm on top of the $325 million it had already invested in 2007. And U2’s world tour was sponsored by BlackBerry.

BIG SETBACK: Because of the troubled economy, plans were suspended for the $250 million Norman Foster–designed U2 Tower, which would be Ireland’s tallest building.

YEAR AHEAD: →
35. Tom Hanks

Playtone

LAST YEAR: 34.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Hanks followed his $758 million blockbuster The Da Vinci Code by revisiting his role as the intrepid professor/sleuth/conspiracy theorist Robert Langdon in Ron Howard’s Angels & Demons. And his influence in Hollywood was readily apparent when he helped resolve the Screen Actors Guild strike by urging studio chiefs to come to the table—and rallying fellow members to vote for a new deal.

__HOBBY:__He’s collected more than 100 old manual and portable typewriters.

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS: He met privately with President Obama during ceremonies for the 65th anniversary of D-day in Normandy, which he attended with surviving members of Easy Company, the famed unit that inspired his and cool buddy Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers HBO mini-series. Hanks’s new World War II documentary, Beyond All Boundaries, will play daily at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans beginning in November.

LOW MOMENT: When buddy Julia Roberts upstaged the big tribute to Hanks, 53, at Lincoln Center by bandying about the word “fuck” as though she were Rahm Emanuel. While other guests cringed, Hanks graciously said he thought Roberts’s speech was very funny.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗

Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg

IAC, DVF

LAST YEAR: 18.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Diller’s proposed $2.5 billion merger of his Ticketmaster, the biggest ticket seller for concerts, and Live Nation, the top promoter and venue owner, will create a juggernaut—if anti-trust regulators don’t block it. Meanwhile, DVF’s youthful appeal has kept her $200-million-a-year fashion business profitable through the recession, and she continues to lead the industry in her third term as president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

BIG FEUD: Bruce Springsteen assailed Ticketmaster for a technical glitch: some of his fans couldn’t buy $65-to-$95 tickets for his May concert in New Jersey but were redirected to the company’s TicketsNow Web site, which offered them for hundreds of dollars apiece. Diller, 67, countered by accusing the performer of holding back nearly 1,000 of the seats closest to the stage for his own entourage.

LATEST ACT OF DO-GOODERY: In June the couple donated $10 million to New York City’s new High Line park, which has been an enormous success since opening that same month.

QUOTE: “People will pay for content. They always have,” Diller said at the Advertising 2.0 conference in June. “I absolutely believe the Internet is passing from its free phase into a paid system.”

YEAR AHEAD: →
37. Mickey Drexler

J. Crew

LAST YEAR: 52.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: J. Crew brand awareness increased thanks to an Obama stimulus, as the First Family wore the label for key photo ops (Michelle and her daughters on Inauguration Day, Barack that night at the balls). Revenues increased 2 percent in the first quarter, and the company’s stock price, which was as low as $9 earlier this year, has since rebounded past $30.

TRIMMING THE FAT: In March, J. Crew saved about $40 million by cutting 95 positions and suspending 401(k) matching contributions and merit-based wage increases for the entire workforce.

FLYING HIGH: In addition to his private-jet use (for which J. Crew paid $911,000 in 2008), last year Drexler, 64, started tooling around in a helicopter. He owns an interest in the chopper and gets reimbursed when he uses it for business.

EMPLOYEE RELATIONS: Drexler, who interviews everyone before they are hired to work at the company’s headquarters, likes to see coffee-shop and restaurant work experience on people’s résumés. He thinks service-industry employees know what hard work means.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
38. Oprah Winfrey

Harpo

LAST YEAR: 43.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Oprah is still the single most popular, and powerful, TV host in the world, able to steer millions toward whatever book, diet, or self-help philosophy she embraces. Her highest-profile endorsement to date: fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama. Its partial payoff: she scored lots of camera time during his Election Night victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park. And while there is continual chatter that her appeal may be dimming, no challenger has come close to catching her.

COOL NEW PAL: Former Viacom C.E.O. Tom Freston, whom Oprah, 55, describes as her “business soul mate” and who has been helping her staff the new Oprah Winfrey Network, with hires like Christina Norman, the former president of MTV (and former Freston employee).

LATEST BIG GET: The Queen of all Media will open her 24th season with pop diva Whitney Houston, in what is being billed as “the most anticipated music interview of the decade.” The singer, who’s had a tumultuous several years, hasn’t given an interview since 2002.

LATEST ENTHUSIASM: Oprah gave trendy Web service Twitter a boost in April by signing up and introducing her audience to its co-founder Evan Williams. (She had a million followers in 28 days.)

THORN IN HER SIDE: In August, Oprah and her medical guru, Dr. Mehmet Oz, filed suit against more than three dozen companies to stop them from using the two’s images to sell dietary supplements online.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
39. George Clooney

Actor, Producer, Director, Activist

LAST YEAR: 55.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Skipped this year’s Oscars ceremony to meet with the president and vice president at the White House and tell them about his most recent trip to Darfur refugee camps (which he visited with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and NBC’s Ann Curry). In July, with actor Bill Murray, Clooney traveled to the site of the G-8 Summit, L’Aquila, the Italian mountain town that was devastated a few months earlier by an earthquake, leaving thousands homeless. He plans to shoot a movie there to aid the region.

__INDUSTRY RELATIONS:__Robert De Niro, Tom Hanks, and Meryl Streep joined Clooney to urge a settlement in the conflict between the Screen Actors Guild and the studios—and later moved his own Smokehouse production company from Warner Bros., the studio he had been associated with for almost 20 years, to Sony.

PUBLIC RELATIONS: Clooney’s publicist had to deny his death amid erroneous reports on the Internet following the demise of Michael Jackson and of Farrah Fawcett.

SIDEKICKS: The four geese that wander into his bedroom at his Lake Como villa.

THORN IN HIS SIDE: Fellow activists fault Clooney, 48, for cashing in as a pitchman for Nestlé coffee when the company was criticized globally for aggressively marketing baby formula in developing countries.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
40. Meryl Streep
Actor

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Everyone adores the regal Streep, who at age 60 is undeniably Hollywood’s most skillful actress (her performance as a tough nun in Doubt earned her a record-breaking 15th Oscar nomination and 23rd Golden Globe nod) as well as one of its top-drawing female stars, as witnessed by The Devil Wears Prada ($325 million worldwide gross) and Mamma Mia ($600 million). The Wall Street Journal described her buoyant turn as Julia Child in this summer’s Julie & Julia as “a grand comic performance” from “a fearless actress,” andTheNew York Times wrote: “By now this actress has exhausted every superlative that exists, and to suggest that she has outdone herself is only to say that she has done it again.” Critics and audiences alike felt Streep’s culinary giant upstaged Amy Adams as the present-day blogger Julie Powell.

FAMILY RELATIONS: She took a year off after the birth of each of her four children, who are now aged 18 to 29.

LEGEND HAS IT: She was a mousy teen before she dyed her hair blonde, switched to contact lenses—and was named homecoming queen of her New Jersey high school.

YEAR AHEAD: ↑

Jeffrey Katzenberg
DreamWorks Animation

LAST YEAR: 53.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: As most of the big studios retrench and shed staff, Katzenberg’s cartoon shop is on the move, increasing its movie output and expanding into television, theme parks, and road shows—even hiring people. His company’s last three movies—Monsters vs. Aliens, Kung Fu Panda,andMadagascar: Escape 2 Africa—have brought in more than $1.6 billion at the worldwide box office, helping earnings jump 139 percent in the first quarter this year. Next up: How to Train Your Dragon, set for release next March, followed by yet another installment of the profitable Shrekfranchise.

WHEELS: A new black Prius 10. (He sold his old Mustang on eBay.)

CAN BE PROUD OF: The DreamWorks–produced show The Penguins of Madagascar, which aired on Nickelodeon, beat SpongeBob SquarePantsto become, for a short time, the No. 1 kids show on television in 2009.

COMPENSATION WATCH: The former Disney studio chief, 58, just renewed his contract with DreamWorks through 2013 in a deal that will pay him $1 a year. “I couldn’t get the board to give me a raise,” Katzenberg says. “These are tough times.”

RECESSION-DEFINING MOMENT: In January, reports surfaced that the bulk of the Katzenberg family’s $20-million-plus charitable trust was lost in Bernie Madoff’s imaginary ledgers.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
42. Ryan Kavanaugh
Relativity Media

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The 34-year-old whiz kid has raised an astonishing $8 billion from hedge-funders and other Wall Street types to bankroll Hollywood—including a $3 billion deal to finance 75 percent of Universal’s movies through 2012. His Relativity Media helped pay for productions such as Hancock, Burn After Reading,Mamma Mia, Pineapple Express, Frost/Nixon,Atonement, and 3:10 to Yuma. And Kavanaugh paid $150 million to Universal to buy Rogue Pictures, which makes low-budget horror films for teens and twentysomethings, with plans to expand it into a lifestyle company with a clothing brand and an online social network.

WHEELS: 1961 Maserati convertible.

CRIB: Three-bedroom oceanfront beach-house rental in Malibu.

__SELF-DESTRUCTIVE STREAK:__The industry’s Schadenfreude was palpable as Kavanaugh faced a possible one-year jail sentence after his second drunk-driving arrest, in October 2008. The D.U.I. charges were dropped. He pleaded no contest to reckless driving and was fined about $1,500 and ordered to take a D.M.V. class.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The incredibly successful auteur behind Madea Goes to Jail launched the first major film-and-TV studio owned by an African-American: a 30-acre compound in Atlanta with soundstages, a back lot, and a commissary. The grand opening was attended by a Who’s Who of black Hollywood, including Sidney Poitier and Oprah. The 40-year-old’s seven low-budget films (in five years) have grossed more than $350 million (Perry earned $75 million last year), his House of Payne is the highest-rated sitcom ever on cable TV, his 11 stage plays (Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Tyler Perry’s The Marriage Counselor) are attended by more than 30,000 people a week, and he has sold 25 million DVDs and written a No. 1 New York Times nonfiction best-seller, Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings.

THORN IN HIS SIDE: The six companies that filed liens for unpaid bills for building his film studio and his $5 million, 26-room house on 12 acres outside Atlanta. He claimed the work was substandard.

BRAGGING RIGHTS: He has dined with the Obamas.

FINANCIAL ACUMEN: Owns 100 percent of his films and gets a 30 percent tax-credit rebate for filming in Georgia.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS: He lived in his Geo Metro in Atlanta and worked as a used-car salesman and collection agent to save $12,000 to put on his first play, I Know I’ve Been Changed, in 1998.

YEAR AHEAD: ↑
44. Miuccia Prada

Prada

LAST YEAR: 30.

__STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__After opening 34 new stores in 2008, the famed designer and her C.E.O., husband Patrizio Bertelli, negotiated an extension on payment of some $650 million in debt, a move which will aid her burgeoning fashion empire’s ongoing expansion. (She now has 238 stores worldwide.) Last September, the awful economy forced the company to call off its long-in-the-work plans for an initial public offering of stock. But Prada reportedly turned down investors who were interested in taking minority stakes, and is still looking to go public eventually.

BOLD MOVE: Despite the pressures of the economic recession, Prada, 60, has remained committed to her patronage of the arts beyond her work in fashion. April marked the debut in Seoul of her new exhibition pavilion, “Transformer,” a 180-ton, 66-foot-tall structure of steel supports and translucent polyvinyl skin, designed by starchitect Rem Koolhaas.

__YEAR AHEAD:__↗
45. Karl Lagerfeld
Chanel, Fendi, Lagerfeld

LAST YEAR: 47.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Lagerfeld, perhaps the world’s greatest living couturier, doesn’t seem terribly concerned about the economy. “We have no budget,” he says regarding Chanel, where he is creative director. “Throwing money out the window brings money back in through the front door.” His extracurricular activities suggest this as well: He crafted a $1,400 teddy bear, a $7,450 Chanel coin, and costumes for the English National Ballet, among other side projects. The designer also found time to take his inaugural trip to Moscow, where a Chanel collection was shown in the city for the first time since 1967.

FASHION SENSE: He buys his shoes one size too small.

RARE EVIDENCE OF VINCIBILITY: The news last winter that Chanel was cutting 200 of its Paris jobs (approximately 10 percent of its production workforce) rocked the luxury world—and that was after the company announced that its costly Chanel Mobile Art exhibition wasn’t going to complete its world tour.

STAB AT IMMORTALITY: Lagerfeld, 71, has been told that Alain Wertheimer, whose family owns Chanel, is selling the house when the designer leaves.

TRUE CONFESSION: The designer goes through at least 365 bottles of Shu Uemura’s Pleasure of Japanese Bath oil per year. Although you’re supposed to use only one cup per bath, he pours the whole bottle in every morning.

RECESSION TACTIC:“Buy less food.”

YEAR AHEAD: ↗

Jeff Bewkes

Time Warner

LAST YEAR: 27.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Time Warner’s cable and TV divisions are doing pretty well, but the rest of the company is not. So Bewkes is getting ready to dump AOL, via a spin-off, a decade after his predecessors merged with the Internet albatross. Observers are betting that he’ll also get rid of magazine giant Time Inc., or at least dramatically pare down the company’s list of 125 titles.

FUTURE MOVES: Time Warner already pocketed some $9 billion when it spun off its cable business and may well have more cash on hand when it dumps AOL. Bewkes has avoided spending any of it so far, but a horde of bankers and other underemployed outsiders want him to do something with the pile of money. Most commonly floated scenario: Time Warner buys NBC Universal from G.E. (The recession has altered this idea, since NBC Universal is a major source of revenue for troubled G.E.)

__FIRST JOB:__Bewkes, 57, worked at a Sonoma, California, vineyard.

BRAGGING RIGHTS: His Warner Bros.Television Group has development deals with a practically every producer working in TV right now: J.J. Abrams, Jerry Bruckheimer, Chuck Lorre, Josh Schwartz, David E. Kelley, and John Wells. No wonder this unit of Warner Bros. is the top supplier of shows (45 this year) and earns 50 percent of the studio’s total profits. Impressive when you consider the studio is home to the billion-dollar Harry Potter franchise.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
47. Robert De Niro

Tribeca Enterprises

LAST YEAR: 59.

__STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__The Tribeca Film Festival, which he co-founded and leads with Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, sustained its momentum in its eighth year with screenings of new works from Woody Allen, Spike Lee, and Steven Soderbergh as well as a street fair and a “Drive-In,” the festival’s free outdoor screening series. Although the economic downturn knocked out top-level sponsor General Motors, Tribeca picked up new support from Heineken, AMC, and DirecTV. De Niro, 66, and his partners hired Geoff Gilmore, the longtime mastermind of the Sundance Film Festival, to be their new creative director, and prepared to launch a branch of their festival in Qatar in November.

__HAUNT:__The restaurant at his Greenwich Hotel.

THORN IN HIS SIDE: He and fellow investors having to pay $2.5 million to settle a lawsuit claiming that managers and sushi chefs at their Nobu restaurant chain had muscled in on the waitstaff’s tips.

__BIGGEST LETDOWNS:__In 2008, the legendary actor starred in two films—What Just Happened and Righteous Kill—in which directors (Barry Levinson, Jon Avnet) paired him with other superb players (Bruce Willis, Catherine Keener, John Turturro, Al Pacino, Stanley Tucci, Robin Wright Penn), but the material simply didn’t live up to the talent.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
48. Jon Stewart
The Daily Show

LAST YEAR: 44.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: What happens to America’s most popular political comedian once George W. Bush, a reliable target for eight years, leaves the stage? Nothing. Stewart, who some believe is this generation’s Walter Cronkite, has found no shortage of subjects for withering scrutiny, including Jim Cramer, CNBC’s celebrity stock-market soothsayer. But it’s fair to say he hasn’t heaped an equal amount of abuse on Barack Obama—yet.

LITTLE BUDDY: Adam Chodikoff, a Daily Show producer who does most of the research—using newspapers and phone calls—that allows Stewart, 46, to flay his targets in monologues and interviews.

NEMESIS: Jeff Zucker, who takes umbrage with Stewart’s skewering of his employee Jim Cramer: “Just because someone who mocks authority says something doesn’t make it so.”

__NEW ENEMY:__Bill O’Reilly, who criticized Stewart for using Fox News clips out of context when condemning the right-leaning network’s reporting on health-care reform. (To be fair and balanced, O’Reilly also commented on how much he likes the satirist.)

FUTURE MOVE: Stewart has long been linked to CBS—C.E.O. Les Moonves famously floated his name as a replacement for Dan Rather back in early 2005—but the most obvious opening won’t be available for a while: David Letterman’s new contract keeps him at the Eye until 2012.

YEAR AHEAD: ↑
49. Arnold Schwarzenegger
Governor of California

LAST YEAR: 33.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Schwarzenegger’s popularity took a hit in 2009 as the governor’s failure to bring California’s legislators to a budget deal left the state in financial disarray, costing it some $25 million a day, by one July estimate. With just 18 months left in office, Schwarzenegger, 62, has staked his political legacy on hitting a difficult trifecta of needed fiscal reforms, a balanced budget, and no new tax hikes.

MOGUL BOGEY: One of Schwarzenegger’s ideas to bring the California budget in under par was a service tax on golf, which would have added 8 to 10 percent to the cost of golf-related purchases. But lovers of the links revolted, and the proposal wasn’t included in the budget that was passed in February.

ART WATCH: At an Aspen art gallery, Schwarzenegger fell in love with a 250-pound bronze sculpture of a grizzly bear. It now sits outside his office in Sacramento.

MAN-OF-THE-HIGH-PEOPLE MOVE: In May, Schwarzenegger said that it was time the state had an open debate regarding the legalization and taxation of marijuana.

YEAR AHEAD: →
50. Diego Della Valle
Tod’s

LAST YEAR: 76.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: After Tod’s defied the downturn by posting an 8 percent increase in sales last year, the Italian luxury-goods tycoon invested $30 million this spring to double his stake in Saks Inc., to 5.9 percent. As the department-store chain’s second-largest shareholder, after Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú, he has proposed plans to turn the beloved institution around.

MODUS OPERANDI: Insists on keeping all of Tod’s manufacturing in Italy.

__DAILY ROUTINE:__Starts his day by walking his eight dogs, with son Filippo, aged 10.

WHEELS: A red Ferrari (he sits on the company’s board) and a Fiat 500.

WINGS: A private jet; the interior is lined with Tod’s tan leather.

AQUATIC TOY: He keeps John F. Kennedy’s Marlin (bought at auction at Christie’s in 1998) docked in Capri (and a portrait of J.F.K. hangs in his office).

SIDE JOB: The 55-year-old owns Italy’s Fiorentina soccer club.

__EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY ILL-ADVISED TIMING:__During the painfully real economic crisis, Tod’s debuted a six-minute film about Gwyneth Paltrow dealing with a “handbag crisis.”

YEAR AHEAD: ↗

Howard Stringer
Sony

LAST YEAR: 39.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Over the past few years, Sony has lost major face in a number of key businesses it once lorded over—in mobile music players (see Sony’s Walkman vs. Apple’s iPod), gaming (PlayStation vs. Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendo’s Wii), and video cameras (Handycam vs. Pure Digital’s Flip). The result: Sony’s cash flow in its main businesses plummeted from $5 billion to a negative $3 billion.

BIG BOLD MOVE: In February, Sir Howard, 67, reorganized the electronics business into two new operating groups and promoted four young executives—whom he has dubbed “the four musketeers”—to run Sony’s key divisions. Critics see the reorg as a desperate, last-ditch attempt at righting Sony’s flagging fortunes. But so far investors like what they see: since the announcement, Sony shares are up 70 percent.

__COOL GADGET:__The HX1, Sony’s “sweep panorama” camera, can capture a 224-degree vista in a single frame.

SHOULD BE PROUD OF: Blu-Ray. Early sales of the high-definition video format are far outpacing those of DVD when the latter was introduced in 1997.

SHOULD BE EMBARRASSED ABOUT: Gaming rival Nintendo, whose market capitalization is greater than Sony’s despite its logging one-fifth of the revenue.

YEAR AHEAD: →
52. Carlos Slim Helú
Telémex, América Móvil

LAST YEAR: 46.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The enigmatic billionaire, ruthless and efficient, single-handedly dominates the Mexican economy, controlling some 200 companies and accounting for 40 percent of the nation’s stock-market index. After losing tens of millions of dollars (on paper) from buying a 6.9 percent ownership stake inThe New York Times Company last year, he protected his investment by saving the Gray Lady from financial collapse with a $250 million loan in January—at an eye-popping “junk bond” interest rate of 14 percent.

DIGITAL LITERACY: Loves his BlackBerry, but says he doesn’t have a computer (and claims he doesn’t know how to use one).

PASTIME: He’s a baseball fan who’s fascinated by statistics—and roots for the overdog New York Yankees.

FOOT IN MOUTH: Facing pressure to increase his philanthropy, Slim, 69, told The New Yorker, “I don’t believe in charities too much.... They can make you popular ... but you don’t solve any problems.” Nonetheless he pledged to increase his foundations’ endowments from $4 billion to $10 billion.

YEAR AHEAD: →
53. Philippe Dauman
Viacom

LAST YEAR: 41.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Viacom usually touts the success of its cable networks, but as advertisers sit on the sidelines, its Paramount studio is looking better and better. Lost mastermind J. J. Abrams overhauled the Star Trek franchise to the delight of both fans and critics and to the tune of more than $380 million in global ticket sales. And while critics hated the Transformers sequel, it’s second only to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as the biggest film of 2009, posting some $800 million worldwide in box-office receipts.

MANAGING UPWARD: Dauman’s job first and foremost is to please hard-to-please chairman Sumner Redstone, who doesn’t make things easy. Last fall, Redstone spooked investors by selling off a big chunk of his Viacom stock to satisfy creditors, sending the company’s stock price even lower.

FAMILY AFFAIR: Dauman’s son Philippe Jr. works at Google, which Viacom is still suing for $1 billion in a copyright-infringement case. Philippe Sr., 55, says he thanked Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt personally for hiring his kid.

YEAR AHEAD: →
54. Marc Jacobs

Marc Jacobs, Marc by Marc Jacobs, LVMH

LAST YEAR: 78.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The rehabbed American fashion designer, who helms two namesake collections and is the artistic director of Louis Vuitton, made a splash as the honorary chair of the annual Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute gala, which he hosted along with Justin Timberlake and Kate Moss, whom he outfitted in a custom silk gold-lamé dress and a turban. The event raised $5.4 million for the museum. Jacobs, 46, expanded internationally (Marc by Marc Jacobs stores popped up in London, Paris, and Madrid), created a 1980s-inspired neon Stephen Sprouse line for L.V. (complete with an $8,250 skateboard), and discovered his love for “skorts” (a kilt-looking skirt-and-shorts combination that he’s paired with his Stephen Sprouse graffiti-print leggings).

PARTIED OUT: He canceled his yearly holiday bash, and his February New York Fashion Week show was without the usual M.J. flash: the guest list was down to 700 from 2,000; there was no mega-set (just a red carpet); and he nixed his post-show party.

REAL-ESTATE WATCH: In January he started renting a $30,000-per-month, 2,500-square-foot condominium at the Jean Nouvel–designed 40 Mercer Street building, in New York City.

SHOULD BE EMBARRASSED ABOUT: Marc Jacobs International paid a $1 million settlement to New York State for allegedly making under-the-table payments to the former superintendent of the 26th Street Armory, where Jacobs traditionally holds his Fashion Week show.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
55. Michael Bay
Director

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Hollywood’s premier producer of big, loud, lucrative entertainments. The latest, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, has been derided by critics, as are most of his works (see: Bad Boys, The Rock, Pearl Harbor). And it will be one of the year’s most successful films, likely earning him something in the $75-million-plus range.

CENTER OF GRAVITY: Miami, in a house once owned by wrestler Hulk Hogan.

BIG IMPORTANT FRIENDS: Steven Spielberg, who tapped him to direct two Transformers movies for DreamWorks and may have him direct I Am Number Four as well, and Jerry Bruckheimer, who produced his earlier blockbusters.

IN HIS OWN WORDS: “C’mon, guys, critics? Give me a break. Do you all have short-term memory? They killed the first one, and it still became a worldwide smash. I made this for you, the audience!”—Bay, 44, on his blog, accurately predicting the box-office appeal of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen before the movie opened in the U.S.

YEAR AHEAD: →

John Galliano

Christian Dior

LAST YEAR: 83.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The 48-year-old designer now produces 32 collections a year—“proof that demand for fashion, for originality, is on the rise,” says Galliano, who is banking on his bottom line’s being buoyed by people who still prefer timeless (expensive) pieces to fast (inexpensive) fashion. Plus, with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy wearing Dior at the nato Summit, the Gibraltar-born designer became more visible than ever. But because the economy has “made people reassess the relevance of the luxury-goods industry,” Galliano saw Dior revenues plummet 27 percent in the first half of 2009.

SIX DEGREES OF MICHAEL JACKSON: Diana Ross was Galliano’s first celebrity client.

PET PROJECT: Dior commissioned 21 Chinese contemporary artists to create artwork inspired by the fashion house and, starting last November, showcased the pieces in a Beijing exhibition alongside 90 of the label’s couture pieces. Following the show’s opening, Charlize Theron, Eva Green, and Marion Cotillard joined Galliano for a private dinner.

CREDO: “You have to have courage and integrity at all times. There is no room to make mistakes.”

YEAR AHEAD: →
57. Tom Freston

Firefly

RETURNING.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Getting forced out by Sumner Redstone three years ago turned out to be a brilliant career move for former Viacom C.E.O. Freston, best known for building cable networks such as MTV and Nickelodeon. While his talents were sorely missed in Hollywood—Viacom imploded in his absence, its shares falling from $37 when he left to around $15 two years later—Freston, 63, traveled adventurously around the world to Singapore, Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, China, and Afghanistan. But he slowly gave in to persistent entreaties by Oprah to advise on her new cable-TV venture, OWN (the Oprah Winfrey Network), which Freston called the hottest idea since MTV, and by his old buddy Bono to assist in his humanitarian efforts. Oprah now calls him her “business soulmate.”

POWER-COUPLE BONA FIDES: Wife Kathy is a best-selling self-help author of titles such as The One, Expect a Miracle,andQuantum Wellness.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
58. Leslie Moonves
CBS

LAST YEAR: 54.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The upside: CBS remains the dominant broadcaster—even David Letterman’s late-night show has moved from its perennial No. 2 slot to trump NBC. (Of course, longtime rival Jay Leno is no longer competing against him.) The problem: Wall Street now saves its love for cable-TV networks, which get money from both advertisers and cable-TV operators, helping to insulate them against, say, worldwide economic slowdowns. And Moonves. 58. has just two cable plays of his own—CBS College Sports and Showtime, the would-be HBO.

VACATION SPOT: Capri.

EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY SAVVY DEAL-MAKING: Cable-TV operators aren’t required to pay CBS for the rights to air their shows, but Moonves has been able to extract a payment from Time Warner Cable nonetheless. Look for him to do the same thing with other cable companies.

EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY OVERZEALOUS DEAL-MAKING: Moonves paid $1.8 billion for Web publisher CNET, just months before the financial meltdown obliterated the stock price for every media property. Moonves has insisted he still “loves” the deal.

YEAR AHEAD: →
59. Dan Doctoroff

Bloomberg L.P.

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Whatever it is Doctoroff—the former New York City deputy mayor who ditched his public-servant role in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration in 2007 to instead run Bloomberg’s L.P.—and his cohorts are preparing to do at the finance media company, the gunpowder has been loaded, the wadding is in, and the projectile is ready to fire. But in what direction? Will they buy The New York Times?Time Inc.? CNBC?No one is talking, especially Doctoroff, but expect a major deal in late 2009 or 2010.

BIG MOVE: Persuading the essentially retired 62-year-old former Sony BMG and NBC executive Andy Lack to join Bloomberg as head of multi-media operations.

IMPERIAL NON-EXPANSION: A handful of staffers at Time Inc., without the authority to actually authorize a sale, approached Bloomberg about the possibility of the firm’s buying some of Time Inc.’s magazine titles. Discussions went nowhere. The firm was also lukewarm to the idea of buying BusinessWeek when owner McGraw-Hill put it up for sale in July.

MOGUL RELATIONS: The mayor doesn’t give anyof his employees—Doctoroff, 51, included—equity in Bloomberg L.P., restricting their compensation to salary, bonuses, and a long-term incentive plan that won’t kick in unless the company hits $10 billion in annual revenue. It’s more than halfway there.

CAN BE PROUD OF: When he was deputy mayor, Doctoroff helped spur the largest burst of parkland creation in New York City since the time of Robert Moses.

ON THE RECORD: “[Bloomberg L.P.] has, in many ways, the most powerful business model I’ve ever encountered.”

YEAR AHEAD: ↑
60. Charlie Rose
The Charlie Rose Show

LAST YEAR: 81.

__STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__The favored interlocutor of such New Establishment regulars as Ron Howard (23 appearances so far), Tom Hanks (15), Bill Gates (14), Warren Buffett (14), George Clooney (12), Bill Clinton (5), and Brad Pitt (7), Rose has far-reaching aspirations: “My passion,” he says, “is to create the true global conversation.” He’s working on a series about China, and Bloomberg television begins broadcasting a next-day edition of his nightly talkfest during prime-time hours worldwide this month.

GADGET: “I love the Kindle.”

__SIDE JOB:__Contributor to 60 Minutes.

SUMMERTIME CENTER OF GRAVITY: Waterside house in Bellport, Long Island.

WISH LIST: Although he has lured many of the top D.C. power brokers—Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Rahm Emanuel—onto his show, Rose hasn’t landed Obama during his presidency. The American head of state is at the top of his wish list for interviews, followed by China’s Hu Jintao and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Other elusive figures he would like to have on the show: Kate Moss, Tiger Woods, Steve Jobs, Philip Roth, Jasper Johns, and Jack Nicholson.

BRAGGING RIGHTS: Rose says Rahm, Ari, and Zeke Emanuel, who appeared on his program together, gave Rose, a Southern Baptist, “provisional membership” in their Jewish family.

MAN-OF-THE-PEOPLE MOVE: When his show laid off 20 percent of its staff during the downturn, Rose, 67, said on the air how much he appreciated their contributions.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗

Jeff Zucker

NBC Universal

LAST YEAR: 68.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: With NBC dead last among the four major TV networks, the pugnacious Peacock chief upended the prime-time landscape by moving Jay Leno to 10 p.m., scrapping the industry’s traditional rerun schedule, and dumping NBC Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman. Given NBC Universal’s dismal second quarter—operating profits were off 41 percent—more radical changes are probably in the works.

__FRENEMY:__Harvey Weinstein. NBC Universal recently resolved a lawsuit the network brought against Zucker’s old pal after Weinstein moved the hit show Project Runway from NBC’s Bravo cable channel to Lifetime. “My windows are dirty, and I’m still waiting for him to come clean them,” Zucker says.

LUNCH SPOT: Fresco.

ACTIVITY: A lifelong tennis player, Zucker, 44, has upped his time on the golf course, “because my trajectory can only be up in golf and can only be down in tennis.”

SHOULD BE PROUD OF: Hulu, a Web video site launched in partnership with Fox last year. Conventional wisdom said the two TV companies could never compete against user-generating Web kids, but the site has been a huge success.

YEAR AHEAD: ↘
62. Ted Fortsmann
IMG Worldwide

__LAST YEAR:__63.

__STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__Since acquiring the global sports, entertainment, and media agency IMG in 2004 for $750 million, the former leveraged-buyout king has been pushing aggressively into the college-sports market, brokering $110 million deals with Ohio State and the University of Nebraska and an $86 million pact with the University of Michigan. His latest deal outside the U.S.: producing professional cricket matches in India.

COOL FRIEND: Ari Emanuel.

__BEVERAGE:__Stewart’s root beer.

__POTENTIAL BACKLASH:__Critics of IMG’s collegiate expansion charge that the agency’s far-reaching representation—from coaches to schools to the N.C.A.A.—raises major conflict-of-interest issues.

ROMANTIC RELATIONS: Though he is often seen with her in public (and at private banquets), Forstmann, 69, insists he is only “friends” with the 38-year-old Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi.

RUMOR MILL: Forstmann is said to be a big backer in a new entertainment advisory firm being launched by former Goldman Sachs and UBS Warburg bankers Joe Ravitch and Jeff Sine.

YEAR AHEAD: →
63. Brian Roberts
Comcast

LAST YEAR: 65.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Even a recession can’t get consumers to part with their cable TV. And since Roberts, 50, runs the country’s biggest cable-TV provider, that gives him a lot of leverage—and cash—to make deals. Look for a big one in the next year or so.

POSSIBLE ACHILLES’ HEEL: The rise of “cable cutters”—tech-savvy dwellers who (anecdotally, at least) are dropping their cable-TV subscriptions, or never signing up for them in the first place.

BRAVE NEW WORLD: To counter the rise of free Web video sites, such as Hulu, Comcast plans to launch its own, which will give Web surfers access to any TV show made available in the pending deal—if they keep their Comcast cable subscription.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
64. Lorne Michaels
Producer

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Ratings soared at his 35-year-old stalwart Saturday Night Live thanks to pointed and hilarious campaign satire by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. The cameo by the real Sarah Palin attracted 15 million viewers, the show’s biggest audience in 14 years. Meanwhile, Michaels, 65, helped his S.N.L. alumni mount an all-out assault on pop culture: He produced Fey’s Emmy-winning 30 Rock, readied a prime-time version of “Weekend Update” to debut on NBC this fall, placed Jimmy Fallon in Conan O’Brien’s late-night host job, and negotiated a deal with finance wizard Ryan Kavanaugh’s Rogue production company for a movie inspired by *S.N.L.’*s “MacGruber” skits. And *S.N.L.’*s Al Franken finally became a U.S. senator.

TRIBUTE: “Lorne Michaels single-handedly made my career in television,” said Conan O’Brien as he left his graveyard-shift slot to become the host of The Tonight Show.

THORN IN HIS SIDE: The 32-year-old stalker who believed that Michaels stole his ideas—and went to Michaels’s Central Park South apartment building seeking to “chat.”

LEGEND HAS IT: His cat Steve was once a Purina model.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
65. Vivi Nevo

NV Investments

LAST YEAR: 42.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Often referred to as an international man of mystery, the Israeli investor does his best to stay under the radar. But that’s hard to do when it’s been said that you were once the biggest individual shareholder in both Time Warner and Goldman Sachs (neither claim is likely true). Last year he was profiled in a lengthy New York Times story. True to form, Nevo declined to comment for the piece.

BIG PURCHASE: A new house in the Paradise Cove section of Malibu.

BIG MOVES: He increased his stock holdings in a number of key areas of interest this year—though he won’t disclose in which companies specifically.

__SHOULD BE EMBARRASSED ABOUT:__While vacationing on the beaches of St. Barth’s, Nevo, 44, was caught nibbling and stroking the exposed behind of his fiancée, Ziyi Zhang. The widely circulated photographs caused an uproar in the actress’s homeland of China.

__CLOUD OF UNCERTAINTY:__One of Nevo’s investments, Spot Runner, is being sued by ad giant WPP, which accused the Internet-based T.V. ad agency of selling shares after artificially inflating the value of its stock.

YEAR AHEAD: →

Richard Plepler
HBO

NEW ENTRY.

__STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__Plepler gets points for helping to find new hits for the premium cable channel, which has been suffering a multi-year hangover following the departure of The Sopranos and Sex in the City. Audiences love *True Blood’*s sexy, southern vampires, and the network is hopeful about Hung. Coming up, contributions from Martin Scorsese (Boardwalk Empire) as well as Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg (The Pacific).

VACATION SPOT: The J.K. Place, Capri.

COOL FRIENDS: High-profile journalists such as *The New Yorker’*s David Remnick, *Newsweek’*s Fareed Zakaria, and *The New York Times’*s Frank Rich.

EVIDENCE OF SAVVY INTRA-CORPORATE PLOTTING: Plepler, 50, was the longtime P.R. man for HBO under the reign of Jeff Bewkes; he later maneuvered himself into the executive-vice-president post. Now he’s surviving as a member of a multi-headed management team cobbled together after the forced departure of HBO boss Chris Albrecht.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
67. Ari Emanuel
William Morris Endeavor Entertainment

RETURNING.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: When his brother Rahm became one of the most powerful players in the West Wing, the latent sibling rivalry seemed to fire up the equally aggressive and temperamental superagent: Ari, 48, made his play to become the single most powerful person in Hollywood when he merged his Endeavor talent agency with William Morris, creating a powerhouse in film, TV, music, and books.

SECRET OF HIS SUCCESS: A YouTube video shows the speech Emanuel gave where he credits dyslexia with providing the “insight to find inventive solutions tp life and in business.”

GREEN BONA FIDES: He drives an electric Tesla Roadster and a Toyota Prius; his house is equipped with rooftop solar panels.

OBAMA-ERA CONFLICT-OF-INTEREST WATCH: He handles an all-powerful roster of musicians both as co-CEO of WME and as a board member of Live Nation, the world’s biggest concert promoter.

CRIB: Emanuel, who now owns a $10 million house in Brentwood, was evicted from a $639-a-month walk-up in L.A.’s Fairfax district in 1992.

YEAR AHEAD: ↑
68. Ron Howard and Brian Grazer
Imagine Entertainment

LAST YEAR: 66.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Following the critical success of the duo’s Frost/Nixon, which received Oscar nominations for best picture and best director, the pair enjoyed a commercial bonanza with Angels & Demons, which grossed $484 million worldwide. Add that to the $758 million box-office receipts of 2006’s The Da Vinci Code and they’ve created a billion-dollar-plus franchise around a swashbuckling Harvard professor’s paranoid conspiracy theories about the Catholic Church. It wasn’t easy, though: after the Vatican pulled his permit three days before a scheduled shoot for Angels & Demons, Howard, 55, filmed on the sly in Rome with hidden cameras—and later re-created St. Peter’s Square in the parking lot of L.A.’s Hollywood Park racetrack.

MAD MEN: For Obama’s presidential campaign, Howard created a four-minute YouTube video ad that featured himself, Andy Griffith, and Henry “the Fonz” Winkler in their old TV roles. Grazer, 58, appeared in an American Express commercial.

REAL-ESTATE WATCH: Grazer paid $13 million in his divorce settlement. Meanwhile, his Cliff May–designed 1930s Pacific Palisades house, which he bought in 1992 for $2.65 million, was sold to bargain hunters Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner for $17.5 million, which was $10 million under the original asking price of two years earlier.

CHILDHOOD EXPLOITS: Born into a movie-making family, in 1954, Howard made his big-screen debut at age 18 months, with his father, Rance, in a western called Frontier Woman.

YEAR AHEAD: →
69. Maria Bartiromo and Erin Burnett

CNBC

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Bartiromo, 42, is still the queen bee over at CNBC, but Burnett, 33, is coming on strong. The women are the only two CNBC personalities who anchor solo hours while the stock market is open. A new, five-year deal Bartiromo inked with her bosses at the end of 2008 means the original Money Honey isn’t ready to relinquish her crown yet, so Burnett had better steel herself for a long fight. (Burnett signed a three-year deal in mid-2008.)

BRAGGING RIGHTS: Bartiromo scored the first post-firing interview with John Thain of Merrill Lynch. Burnett was invited inside Herb Allen’s Sun Valley mogul retreat this year—which is notorious for forcing reporters to remain at arm’s length.

MEASURING STICK: The currency of the television interviewer is the “get.” Bartiromo is on a roll: then Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. But so is Burnett: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley’s John Mack, and Bank of America’s Ken Lewis.

WORLD-DOMINATION WATCH: In the never-ending battle for primacy among CNBC talking heads, Bartiromo was ahead in one noticeable regard for months: it was her face staring down from a giant billboard on the southbound side of Manhattan’s West Side Highway. “I was flattered and honored by it,” she says. “But it was a little Big Brother, considering how huge it is.”

FOOT IN MOUTH: In November 2007, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, Burnett, while looking at footage of then president George W. Bush flanked by two other world leaders, called him “the monkey in the middle.”

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
70. Mike Moritz
Sequoia Capital

LAST YEAR: 88.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The Silicon Valley venture capitalist, legendary for investing early on in both Yahoo! and Google, showed that even a global economic crisis couldn’t stop him: Sequoia raised a new, $1.6 billion fund to make bets on tech start-ups in the U.S. and India. The firm, which also operates in China and Israel, has remained focused on “Web 2.0” plays in digital media and consumer software even while arch-rival Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has bet its own future on clean and green technology.

BRAGGING RIGHTS: While Moritz, 55, hasn’t had a home run like Yahoo! or Google in a while, he defied the downturn nonetheless with Pure Digital Technologies, his eight-year-old San Francisco start-up that has sold more than two million of its inexpensive and easy-to-use Flip video cameras and was acquired for $590 million by Cisco in May.

__LITTLE BUDDY:__Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

__GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS__AWARD FOR FEAR-INDUCING SPEECH: At a mandatory meeting for C.E.O.’s of Sequoia’s portfolio companies, he told the 100 in attendance, “Forget about getting ahead, we’re talking survive,” as they looked at a tombstone saying, “R.I.P. Good Times.”

YEAR AHEAD: →

Dan Brown
Author

RETURNING.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The September release of The Lost Symbol, Brown’s highly anticipated follow-up to *The Da Vinci Code,*is a rare piece of good news for the embattled book-publishing industry. There is no author, except perhaps J. K. Rowling, who can galvanize all media—book publishing, Hollywood, entertainment television, and magazines—quite the way Brown, 45, can. (Though Twilightcreator Stephenie Meyer is giving both a run for their money.) This one book, with its extraordinary first printing of five million copies, could save the publishing industry.

BIG COOL FRIENDS: Tom Hanks and Ron Howard. In Brown’s leading man, Robert Langdon, Hanks and Howard have found their own Indiana Jones—a fountain of never-ending sequels. A film version of The Lost Symbol is due in 2011.

STARTLING CONFESSION: Brown once told an audience that he often uses a pair of gravity boots when he’s suffering from writer’s block, as he finds that hanging upside down offers him new perspectives, in both the literal and the literary sense.

MOGUL COMPARISON: Brown has claimed that he has ideas for about 12 more books on Robert Langdon, but the superstar author sure takes his own sweet time writing about them. The six-year wait between books suggests that even if Doubleday loves its biggest ticket, it can’t possibly love him as much as Little, Brown loves James Patterson, who churns out mega-sellers at least once a year.

BENEVOLENT BOSS: CBS C.E.O. Les Moonves, who has given Blank, 59, more than a decade to find his footing.

LUNCH SPOT: Michael’s, Manhattan’s midtown media epicenter.

POTENTIAL THORN IN HIS SIDE: Epix, a new pay TV channel owned by movie studios that used to work with Showtime, is supposed to provide yet more competition in a crowded field—when it finally shows up.

__YEAR AHEAD:__↗
73. Alber Elbaz

Lanvin

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Since becoming the designer of Paris’s oldest couture house, in 2001, Elbaz has lifted sales to more than $200 million with his romantic and timelessly elegant designs, which he calls “classic with a twist.” His clothes are favored by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Sofia Coppola, Natalie Portman (with whom he talks in Hebrew), and Sarah Jessica Parker.

MODUS OPERANDI: Sleeps only one hour a night during the early stages of designing a collection, fueled by adrenaline and late-night triple espressos.

GUILTY PLEASURE: TV. In Paris Elbaz, 48, rushes home to watch Project Runway. When he lived in New York, he loved Wheel of Fortune.

BRAGGING RIGHTS: He once sold nearly $1 million of merchandise in one day during a personal appearance at Barneys New York, whose creative director has said, “Alber’s clothes are like crack for women.”

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
74. Jean Pigozzi
Investor, art collector

LAST YEAR: 79.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The international playboy has always been the Kevin Bacon of the New Establishment—one or two connections away from seemingly everyone with real influence. An artist in his own right, Pigozzi, 57, had his snapshots featured in the “Pigozzi and the Paparazzi” exhibition of celebrity photography at the Helmut Newton Foundation, in Berlin. The show was reviewed favorably—and validated Pigozzi’s star-clinging lifestyle as an art form.

VIRAL-MARKETING STRATEGY: Pigozzi tried to create buzz by giving away clothing in his Limoland line to buddies Mick Jagger, Uma Thurman, Michael Douglas, and others in A-list spots such as St. Barth’s. The men’s-wear collection debuted last year in high-end stores in Europe and Japan, then had its U.S. launch this year at stores such as Bloomingdale’s. Meanwhile, major designers have failed to express fear or envy.

BRAGGING RIGHTS: Damien Hirst based his painting Bill with Shark on Pigozzi’s photograph of Bill Gates looking at one of Hirst’s sharks encased in formaldehyde.

QUIRK: Pigozzi, who has assembled the world’s largest private collection of contemporary African art, has never set foot on the continent.

YEAR AHEAD: →
75. Bill Keller
The New York Times

LAST YEAR: 60.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Despite a terrifying 32 percent drop in advertising at the newspaper of record and at its Web sites, the company reported a surprising $39 million profit in the second quarter, helped by cutbacks in the newsroom. Executive editor Bill Keller, 60, is fast and furiously scrutinizing ways to make online readers pay up, such as asking for donations or charging “membership” fees for exclusive content and for high usage. Keller said that the effort to save the newspaper “now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause” and called himself the “house optimist” for his belief that Web readers will pay for quality journalism.

BOLD MOVE: Going to great lengths to keep secret the kidnapping of Timesreporter David Rohde when his Taliban abductors demanded silence. Keller enlisted the cooperation of at least 40 major news organizations, including Al-Jazeera, and got Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to freeze Rohde’s page to suppress the news. After seven months of captivity, Rohde finally escaped by slipping down a 20-foot wall.

WORST MOVE: Appeared on aDaily Show segment that made him look ridiculous. “That’s the last time I try to be a good sport,” he later said.

BRAGGING RIGHTS: Keller pointed out in an nytimes.com Q&A that the paper actually outearns The Wall Street Journalon the Web. (The Journal charges $89 a year for an online subscription.)

QUOTE: “I could imagine a day when ... the printed newspaper either becomes a kind of boutique product like the vinyl record, or disappears altogether.”

YEAR AHEAD: ↘

Wang Chuanfu
BYD

NEW ENTRY.

S__TAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__ Wang left a post working for the Chinese government in 1995 to found BYD, which originally focused on rechargeable batteries but is now aimed at becoming the world’s biggest car-maker. He got the best endorsement there is last September, when Warren Buffett invested $230 million for a nearly 10 percent stake in the company. Wang, who has been called a combination of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch, began selling his first electric and hybrid plug-in cars in China in January and expects to have them on the market in the U.S. by 2011.

NERD BONA FIDES: A chemist by training, Wang took apart cell-phone batteries to see how they were made. In 1995, at the age of 29, he started his own mobile-phone rechargeable-battery firm. By 2000, it was one of the world’s largest battery companies.

NET WORTH: Wang, who grew up in extreme poverty, is estimated to be worth $1.3 billion.

MAN-OF-THE-PEOPLE MOVE I: Wang, 43, lives in a BYD-owned housing complex with his wife and daughter.

MAN-OF-THE-PEOPLE MOVE II: To get an edge on competitors such as Sony and Sanyo, which use highly automated production systems, Wang instead employs one of China’s most abundant resources—people.

BUSINESS RELATIONS: In May it was announced that BYD would explore a partnership in hybrid- and electric-car manufacture with Volkswagen, Europe’s largest car-maker.

EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY OBSESSIVE BEHAVIOR: To prove that the company’s electrolyte fluid for its batteries is nontoxic, Wang pours it into a glass and drinks it.

YEAR AHEAD: ↑
77. Jeff Skoll
Participant Media, Skoll Foundation

LAST YEAR: 69.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The eBay billionaire’s Participant Media tries to change the world one movie ticket at a time. Skoll is following his recent releases The Soloist (about mental illness and homelessness) and Food, Inc. (about the troubled food supply) with director Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, a comedy about the Archer Daniels Midland price-fixing scheme starring Matt Damon, and Casino Jack: The United States of Money, about convicted D.C. lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Last September, Skoll created a new, $250 million film fund with a company backed by the Abu Dhabi government. The big cash infusion will finance 15–18 feature films over five years.

LEGEND HAS IT: As a teenager in Toronto he worked pumping gas where on an account of the cold he sometimes had to put petroleum jelly on his exposed skin to prevent it from freezing.

LATEST ACT OF DO-GOODERY: Skoll, 44, put up an initial $100 million to launch the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund, which will target pressing issues such as climate change, water shortages, pandemics, Middle East peace, and nuclear proliferation. The fund is run by Dr. Larry Brilliant, the former head of Google’s philanthropic arm, whose defection was remarked upon in Silicon Valley as one of the key indicators of the “Google brain drain.”

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
78. Vinod Khosla
Khosla Ventures

LAST YEAR: 92.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Since launching Khosla Ventures in 2004, the Sand Hill Road venture capitalist has invested an estimated $500 million of his $1.1 billion personal fortune into 70-plus tech start-ups, most of them immersed in the development of alternative fuel and energy sources. Among them: Calera (war on dirty coal and new materials), Kior (war on oil), and Soraa (high-efficiency L.E.D. lighting). Together with Richard Branson’s Virgin Green Fund, Khosla invested in Gevo, which looks to produce isobutanol from agricultural residues.

__EXECUTIVE TIC:__Khosla, 54, is known to scribble on his office wall to illustrate his eco-ambitions.

RECESSION-DEFYING MOVE: At a time when nearly every industry is looking for government handouts, Khosla has remained a staunch advocate for keeping the clean-energy market free of subsidies.

LABEL-DEFYING MOVE: Khosla said hybrid vehicles are not an effective solution to reducing carbon emissions.

QUOTE: After being sued by an imprisoned serial litigant, he remarked, “Well, there is at least one thing I have in common with Britney Spears and Perez Hilton now.”

__YEAR AHEAD:__↗
79. Stephen Colbert

The Colbert Report

LAST YEAR: 45.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Colbert became the first TV host in U.S.O. history to broadcast a week of shows in a combat zone. Best bit: getting Barack Obama to order General Ray Odierno to shave Colbert’s head.

MOST UNCTUOUS PITCH OF THE YEAR: In pursuit of an interview with Mark Sanford, South Carolina’s globe-trotting, philandering governor, Colbert, 45, promised to provide Sanford with a “friendly place to make light of what I think is a small story that got blown out of scale.”

SIDE JOB: Colbert guest-edited *Newsweek’*s June 15 issue—the first time the magazine tried the stunt. The issue—the publication’s fourth after its redesign—had a serious theme: beefing up coverage of Iraq, leavened with humor, of course.

QUOTE: “It doesn’t matter what they’re saying. Doesn’t matter what the news is, it’s how this person feels about the news, and how you should feel about the news.”—Colbert describing the appeal of the O’Reillys and Hannitys of the world, whom his show parodies.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
80. Rush Limbaugh
Radio host

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: “El Rushbo” signed a new, $400 million, eight-year radio contract for his three-hour daily show, which is heard on more than 600 domestic stations and about 400 military stations overseas. And he proved that he ruled what’s left of the Republican Party when GOP chairman Michael Steele quickly apologized for criticizing him. The White House launched its own campaign to portray the divisive Limbaugh, 58, as the leader of the G.O.P. through statements by press secretary Robert Gibbs, Rahm Emanuel (who called him “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party”) and a Washington Post op-ed by its ally David Plouffe.

MODUS OPERANDI: Spews forth 10,000 words per show without scripts or writers.

WHEELS: A half-dozen cars, including a $450,000 black Maybach 57S.

WINGS: A $54 million Gulfstream G550.

CRIBS: Five homes on an oceanfront Palm Beach property, including a 24,000-square-foot main house with a replica of the Plaza Hotel’s lobby chandelier, a replica of the presidential suite in Paris’s George V hotel, and a scaled-down version of the library at the Biltmore Estate. He put his 4,000-square-foot penthouse at 1049 Fifth Avenue—where he reportedly goes for roughly 15 days a year to avoid Florida hurricanes—on the market in protest of New York governor David Paterson’s plan to tax the rich.

VINDICATION: A Pew Research Center poll found that Limbaugh’s fans, whom he calls “Dittoheads,” scored better than NPR listeners on questions about news knowledge.

YEAR AHEAD: ↘

Glenn Beck

Fox News

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Between joking and crying on the air—he calls himself a “rodeo clown”—the apocalyptic commentator has profited mightily from his fear-mongering: He scored another No. 1 best-seller (Glenn Beck’s Common Sense) and a five-year, $50 million radio deal (he’s on more than 400 stations in the mornings, plus XM Satellite Radio). In January he moved his TV show from CNN’s Headline News to Fox News’ five-p.m. slot, where he averages about 2.3 million viewers daily, ranking him No. 3 overall on cable news behind Fox’s prime-time talkers, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. He even staged a six-city “comedy” tour this summer, simulcast to hundreds of movie theaters, in which Beck, 45, dressed up in wig and breeches as Revolutionary War pamphleteer Thomas Paine.

SIGNATURE MOMENT: In April a guest passed out while shaking Beck’s hand.

WHEELS: Chauffeured black Escalade.

BUSINESS ACUMEN: His multi-book deal with Simon & Schuster gives him a share of the profits and greater creative control of design and marketing in exchange for smaller advance payments.

EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY OVERBLOWN RHETORIC: Compared Al Gore’s advocacy of a global carbon tax to Hitler’s genocidal war against the Jews and compared the financial bailouts to 9/11.

EVIDENCE OF TEMPORARY (BUT EGREGIOUS) LAPSE OF JUDGMENT: Called President Obama a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” sparking a swift backlash from advertisers: 20 companies, including Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, Geico, and Best Buy, have yanked their commercials from his program.

YEAR AHEAD: →
82. Stephenie Meyer
Author

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The Mormon housewife’s Twilight teen-vampire romance novels sold nearly 29 million copies in one year, capturing the top four positions on the USA Today best-seller list for 2008, making her the first author ever to do so. (J. K. Rowling came close with Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 5 with her Harry Potter titles in 2000.) The movie version of Twilight grossed $191 million in the U.S., and the film adaptation of her second book, New Moon, opens in November. Meyer has also inspired hundreds of Web sites from fans who call themselves “Stephen-ites” or “Twi-hards.”

MARITAL RELATIONS: Her husband, Christian, quit his job as an auditor to look after their three sons.

DAILY HABITS: Drives fast but doesn’t consume alcohol or caffeine.

LEGEND HAS IT: Meyer, 35, began writing as a 29-year-old Phoenix housewife in 2003 after dreaming of vampires one night. She wrote 10 pages the next morning before driving her sons to swimming lessons. She moved a desk into the living room and finished her 130,000-word first novel in only three months.

THORN IN HER SIDE: Stephen King, who said that “Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn.”

__NEW THORN IN HER SIDE:__Jordan Scott, who has alleged in a lawsuit filed in August that Meyer stole ideas from her 2006 vampire novel The Nocturne, and used them in Breaking Dawn, which Meyer published in 2008. Meyer’s publisher has said that the claims are meritless.

YEAR AHEAD: ↑
83. Frank Rich
The New York Times, HBO

LAST YEAR: 82.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Rich says that for him the high points of writing his influential Sunday New York Times column in recent months are “not having to think about Bush-Cheney on a daily basis and instead chronicling a fascinating one-of-a-kind historical moment as America’s first black president tries to clean up a multifaceted mess.” Meanwhile, he has been working on several still-unannounced projects in his new role as creative consultant to HBO, including producing a series with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.

GADGET: Kindle.

FAVORITE iPHONE APP: Slacker Radio.

EVIDENCE OF UNCOMMON INDEPENDENT THINKING: Despite having crusaded for Obama’s election, Rich, 60, later derided the new president’s tepid response to the news of $165 million in A.I.G. bonuses, calling it Obama’s “Katrina moment.”

VIEWING PLEASURES: The former Times theater critic says he has been “enjoying the unexpected renaissance on Broadway,” including August: Osage County and the “stupendous revival” of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. He also likes Hung and Mad Men on cable TV, the “hilarious” movie In the Loop, and the novel American Rust.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
84. Robert Allbritton, John Harris, and Jim VandeHei
Politico

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Harris and VandeHei, 36, are old-media veterans who may be creating the model for a new-media success story. The two reporters left The Washington Post in 2006 to start Politico, an all-politics, all-the-time site (and, less crucially, a newspaper). Three years later, it’s a must-read for the fast-twitch Beltway BlackBerry set—and for editors at established news outlets, who find themselves frequently responding to its coverage.

SCOOPS: Among other stories that the site, which is bankrolled by publisher Allbritton, 39, has broken in its brief life: John McCain’s housing empire, Sarah Palin’s clothing budget, and *The Washington Post’*s ill-advised effort to sell access to its reporting staff to Washington lobbyists.

ANIMATING IMPULSE: “Will a blogger be inspired to post on this story?”—one of several questions posed to the Politico staff, explaining what they want their writers and editors to think as they generate fresh copy.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
85. Harvey Levin
TMZ

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Runs TMZ, the online and offline gossip machine everyone loves to complain about—when they’re not reading it. The Time Warner–owned news outlet was the first to report that Michael Jackson had died and has owned the story ever since. It’s generated millions of new eyeballs for the property (which already had 10 million Web-site followers), and grudging respect from traditional-news types.

CAREER-THREATENING TREND: Levin freely admits that he writes checks for news tips, while most American news operations shun the practice. But once they (inevitably) come aboard, a gossip arms race will ensue.

CELEBRITY NON-ENDORSEMENT:“Everybody knows Levin is a human tumor, a graceless character who lives in that weird netherworld.”—Alec Baldwin, upset that TMZ played a scathing voice-mail message in which the actor berated his daughter.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗

Meredith Whitney
Meredith Whitney Advisory Group

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Financial analyst Whitney’s star continues to rise 17 months after her “sell” rating on Citigroup sent the market into a tailspin and helped cost Citigroup C.E.O. Chuck Prince his job. After more than 15 years of working for other people, she set up her own shop in February, the Meredith Whitney Advisory Group.

FITNESS ROUTINE: For several years, Whitney, 39, and her girlfriends have attended a fitness retreat in Mexico called Bikini Boot Camp.

MOGUL RELATIONS: Despite the fact that Merrill Lynch and Wachovia were two of her biggest short positions in 2008, ex-C.E.O.’s John Thain and Bob Steel still came to a party she had in June to celebrate the opening of her new office.

THORN IN HER SIDE: *The Wall Street Journal’*s David Weidner, who wrote in April 2009 that Whitney’s reputation as a Wall Street oracle is overblown and undeserved.

MORTAL ENEMY: Whitney’s 2007 “sell” rating on Citigroup put an end to Chuck Prince’s career just four days later. She says she has yet to run into him in a dark alley but keeps an eye over her shoulder just in case.

BRAGGING RIGHTS: In July, Whitney made a midday call to buy shares in Goldman Sachs, turning a down day into a feverish rally.

QUOTE:“The funny thing is, in your twenties you try and look serious, and after your twenties, you just try and look hot. I’m not an old white dude, so I stick out.”

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
87. David Einhorn
Greenlight Capital

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Einhorn’s short call on Lehman Brothers in May 2008 was one for Wall Street’s record books. And even though he had a tough 2008, he is still considered among the smartest people on Wall Street.

BIG WIN: The hedge-fund manager recently earned a 75 percent return on his bet that shares of Southwest Airlines—which he called an “energy speculator disguised as an airline”—would fall along with oil prices.

MOGUL RELATIONS: In 2003, Einhorn, 40, spent $250,100 in an eBay charity auction to win a lunch with none other than Warren Buffett.

BRAGGING RIGHTS: Einhorn came in 18th place in the 2006 World Series of Poker, winning $659,730 in the process. He donated all of his winnings to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which is dedicated to finding a cure for Parkinson’s disease.

LATEST ACT OF DO-GOODERY: Along with hedge-fund pal Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management, Einhorn recently funded Worse Than War, a documentary on genocide that’s based on the book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and will be released in October.

YEAR AHEAD: →
88. Arianna Huffington

The Huffington Post

LAST YEAR: 90.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Her eponymous Web site, which recently linked up with Facebook and launched sections devoted to sports, books, and technology, hit its stride during the 2008 election, when its mix of lefty bloggers and news stories culled from other publications resonated with an ever increasing audience. After Barack Obama’s victory, it raised another $25 million from investors, then swapped out C.E.O. Betsy Morgan for venture capitalist Eric Hippeau.

SILENT PARTNER: Huffington gets the headlines, but Huffpo co-founder Ken Lerer, a P.R. hotshot who also put in time at AOL, has at least as much influence on the site’s strategy.

LABOR RELATIONS: Huffpo pays nothing to the bloggers and publications it “aggregates.” Huffington, 59, says her contributors should be pleased to get the exposure, and that other sites she points readers to should be happy to get the traffic. Very often, she’s right.

QUOTE: “I did not single-handedly kill newspapers. I had a lot of help from Craigslist.”

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
89. Doug Morris
Universal Music Group

LAST YEAR: 96.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Selling recorded music may be an awful business, but it’s one that Morris, 70, still dominates. Driven by hit acts such as Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, U2, Black Eyed Peas, and Kanye West, Universal stands alone atop the music charts, accounting for one-third of all albums sold.

__SHOULD BE PROUD OF:__Vevo, the soon-to-be-launched online music and video service to be run on the backs of Google and YouTube.

COOL FRIEND: Bono (among many other stars), who urged Morris to reach out to Google to help hatch Vevo.

SHOULD BE EMBARRASSED ABOUT: After shelling out $15 million last summer for rights to the Rolling Stones’ post-1971 catalogue, Morris has yet to sell 5,000 copies of the aging rockers’ records.

RUMOR HAS IT: The fact that Lucian Grainge, the head of Universal Music’s international business, recently bought a house in Connecticut has prompted speculation that the young executive is being readied to take over Morris’s job.

SIGNATURE MOVE: Throws the most exclusive—and most difficult to crash—Grammy Awards party, at the Palm in Los Angeles.

YEAR AHEAD: →
90. William McDonough
William McDonough & Partners

__LAST YEAR:__71.

__STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__Known as the first eco-starchitect, the guru of green buildings and products consulted his cool buddy Brad Pitt on the “Make It Right” housing project for hurricane victims in New Orleans and teamed again with Pitt to help Kiehl’s create its Aloe Vera Biodegradable Liquid Body Cleanser, the first beauty item that McDonough’s product-design firm certified with its “Cradle to Cradle” seal of approval for eco-friendliness.

__SIDE JOBS:__He’s a professor at Stanford and a colleague of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s in VantagePoint Venture Partners, a $4.5 billion fund that invests in green technology.

HOLLYWOOD BONA FIDES: His book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, is a must-read for A-list eco-warriors such as Cameron Diaz, and he appeared in Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary The 11th Hour.

THORN IN HIS SIDE: A Fast Company article claiming that McDonough, 58, failed in his effort to build a model eco-village in rural northeast China.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗

Harvey Weinstein and Bob Weinstein
The Weinstein Company

LAST YEAR: 87.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The indie-film impresarios laid off two dozen employees, or 11 percent of their staff, in November. The upbeat buzz around their film of the Broadway musical Nine, by director Rob Marshall, whose Chicago won six Oscars, has been overshadowed by the news, leaked in June, that the Weinsteins had brought in a financial consultant that specializes in helping companies get out from under too much debt. (The company has around $500 million worth that matures in 2014.) A subsequent article in The New York Times, which laid out how the brothers accumulated the debt and lost sight of what they do best—turning Indie films onto mainstream audiences—bringing them to a do-or-die point in their long storied careers in the movie business, didn’t help matters. But the brothers got some much-needed good news a week later when Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterdsnabbed the top spot at the box office its first weekend in theaters, grossing more than $65 million worldwide.

BIG FEUD I: In April, the Weinsteins ended a legal battle by agreeing to pay NBC Universal to let them move their TV hit Project Runway from NBC’s Bravo channel to Lifetime—after host Heidi Klum said fans should demonstrate outside Harvey’s house for the return of the long-delayed show. More good news: The premiere episode scored its highest ratings ever when its sixth season finally got underway in August.

BIG FEUD II: Harvey, 57, prevailed over producer Scott Rudin by pushing up the release of The Reader so it would be eligible for this year’s Oscars. (Rudin took his name off the credits.) But while the film won a best-actress Oscar for Kate Winslet and received a best-picture nomination, it grossed only $34 million domestically.

PAST LIFE: As a teenager, Harvey did odd jobs for the Beatles’ Apple Records in New York and once picked up John Lennon at the airport.

BRIGHT SPOT: Broadway. Their productions received more than three dozen Tony nominations this year and include the hits Hair, West Side Story, and Billy Elliot: The Musical.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
92. Todd Phillips
Writer, director

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The 38-year-old director’s supremely funny Vegas picture, The Hangover, which he shot on the cheap (estimated between $30 and $35 million), took in $45 million on its opening weekend and more than $200 million in its first five weeks, to become the top-grossing R-rated comedy ever (and No. 3 among all R-rated films, after The Passion of the Christ and Matrix Reloaded). He’s already working on the sequel. Even though it’s Phillips’s third $100-million-plus hit—after Road Trip and Starsky and Hutch (Old Schoolwas just shy of hitting that milestone)—this one anoints him as the leading contender for Judd Apatow’s throne.

PERSONA: Skinny nerd with incongruously deep, throaty voice.

CHUTZPAH WATCH: While shooting a cameo with Mike Tyson, Phillips told the former heavyweight boxing champ that he wasn’t punching the right way for the camera.

CREATIVE DIFFERENCES: He began collaborating with Sacha Baron Cohen on Borat but parted ways early in the film’s development.

NEMESIS: The Writers Guild, for refusing to credit Jeremy Garelick for his crucial rewrite on The Hangover.

YEAR AHEAD: ↑
93. Paul Krugman

The New York Times

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The Nobel Prize winner deployed his must-read Times column and blog (“The Conscience of a Liberal”) to castigate the new administration’s economic policies in response to the recession Krugman, 56, forecast years ago. Hints of a strain in the relationship between Krugman and the Obama camp were evident in the spring, when Krugman told one reporter that Obama had publicly mispronounced his name, saying “Krug-man” instead of “Kroog-man”—and never invited him to the White House. Since then, they’ve had one meeting. His face graced the cover of Newsweek, fans abroad paid rock-concert prices—more than $100 a ticket—to attend his lectures, and a popular YouTube video showed a rock singer asking, “Hey, Paul Krugman, why aren’t you in the administration? ... We need you on the front lines, not just writing for The New York Times.” But he relishes his role as the outsider who can call it as he sees it.

ACCESSORY: Black backpack.

MID-RECESSION COMPENSATION WATCH: Winning the Nobel added about $1.4 million to his bank accounts.

CRIB: Spent $1.7 million this summer on a three-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. (Former Timesreporter Joseph B. Treaster, whom Krugman said he’s “never met,” put the co-op up for sale in early 2008 for $2.5 million.)

EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY EXCESSIVE BEHAVIOR: Posts on his blog as often as six times a day.

THORN IN HIS SIDE: Scottish historian Niall Ferguson (and V.F. contributor). After a tempestuous debate in April over rising Treasury bond yields, the rival Ivy Leaguers (Krugman teaches at Princeton; Ferguson is at Harvard) continued their spat online—with increasing nastiness. (Ferguson called Krugman’s argument “patronizing;” Krugman accused Ferguson of being a “poseur.”)

TRUE CONFESSION: Confirmed reports that he was naked, stepping into a hotel shower, when he answered the phone to hear a caller with a Swedish accent say that he had won the Nobel—and Krugman thought it might be a hoax.

YEAR AHEAD: ↑
94. Bobby Kotick
Activision Blizzard

LAST YEAR: 72.

__STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__Rumor has it that Kotick, 46, isn’t satisfied with running the world’s largest independent video-game company but yearns to be an all-out entertainment mogul: in July, he was reportedly pushing business partner Vivendi to merge with NBC Universal and put him in charge. He’s coming from an enviable position: his Activision Blizzard posted big increases in sales (from $325 million to $981 million in the first quarter) and profits (from $43 million to $189 million) following the release of World Tour, the fourth installment of its Guitar Hero series, the No. 1 family video game. (Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rocksold more than 13 million copies worldwide.) Kotick also has the top war-game series (Call of Duty) and the top multi-player game (World of Warcraft).

__THORN IN HIS SIDE:__Viacom’s *Rock Band,*a rival to Guitar Hero, now features Beatles music.

UNCENSORED EPISODE OF BULLYING BEHAVIOR: Publicly threatened to stop making games for PlayStation 3 unless Sony reduced the $399 price and sold more units. (In August, Sony dropped the price of its game consoles by $100.)

LEGEND HAS IT: As a teenaged entrepreneur, he rented out Studio 54 to throw parties for under-age kids.

YEAR AHEAD: ↑
95. Simon Fuller
19 Entertainment

NEW ENTRY.

__STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST:__The impresario’s American Idol is the top show on American TV, with an average of 27 million viewers and $900 million in annual advertising revenues. Idol is such a pop-culture phenomenon that the announcement of judge Paula Abdul’s departure was treated as major national news. Fuller is also the co-creator of *So You Think You Can Dance.*An avid soccer fan, the svengali behind the Spice Girls now manages the careers of David and Victoria (Posh Spice) Beckham, whom he introduced—and lured to Los Angeles. And Fuller, 49, recently bought a controlling interest in Storm, the London modeling agency that represents Kate Moss and Cindy Crawford.

BIG DEAL: Paid $30 million to keep Ryan Seacrest hosting Idol for three more seasons.

FRENEMY:Idol judge Simon Cowell, whose own show, America’s Got Talent, on NBC, has consistently outdrawn Fuller’s So You Think You Can Dance, on Fox.

YEAR AHEAD: ↗

Jason Kilar
Hulu

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Everyone knew there was no way that Fox and NBC could possibly put together a compelling Web video site that could compete with Google. That’s why critics called the site Clown Co prior to its launch in 2008. But behold! Hulu is a giant success—so much so that the Walt Disney Company signed on last spring. Much of the credit goes to Kilar, a nine-year Amazon veteran. The 38-year-old C.E.O. runs the operation as a go-go tech start-up instead of a lumbering Big Media operation.

HERO: Walt Disney.

OFFICE DÉCOR: Basketball bearing the autographs of the 2009 N.C.A.A. champion University of North Carolina Tarheels; Kilar is a U.N.C. alum.

FIRST JOB: Production assistant at Universal Pictures.

ROAD NOT TAKEN: Kilar left Amazon to pursue a start-up before being tapped to run Hulu; he describes his abandoned project as something involving “structured databases for tech and media.”

YEAR AHEAD: ↗
97. Anil Ambani
Reliance Entertainment

LAST YEAR: 67.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Ambani was the biggest loser when Forbes published its annual wealth ranking in March: his fortune fell by $32 billion, to $10 billion. But that still left him with plenty of cash to close a Bollywood-meets-Hollywood deal with Steven Spielberg to make a $500 million investment in DreamWorks (along with the rights to distribute its films in India).

BAD BLOOD: Anil, 50, and his billionaire brother, Mukesh, (they grew up in a communal building in a distressed neighborhood) foolishly hurt their image by perpetuating a long public feud: they frequently sued each other but rarely talked. In one of their biggest battles, Mumbai’s high court ordered Mukesh’s company to make good on a deal from 2005 (when they split up their late father’s empire) to sell natural gas to Anil’s company for 17 years at a price 44 percent lower than that set by the government. That could mean billions of dollars’ worth of savings for Anil and losses for Mukesh, who appealed to India’s Supreme Court.

__EPISODE OF UNSURPASSED INTRIGUE:__Police arrested two men for allegedly sabotaging Ambani’s Bell 412 helicopter by pouring pebbles and soil into the gearbox while it was parked at a Mumbai airport. Police believed it wasn’t an attempt to murder Ambani but rather a case of a maintenance company’s workers taking revenge on management. The technician who reported the tampering was found dead the following week on railroad tracks in Mumbai, raising speculation: accident, suicide, or murder because of his snitching?

LATEST ACT OF DO-GOODERY: Ambani opened a 730-bed hospital in Mumbai.

YEAR AHEAD: →
98. Craig Venter
Scientist

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The swashbuckling scientist, best known for sequencing the human genome in 2000, says he’ll be able to create synthetic life, in the form of a single cell, within the next year.

CENTER OF GRAVITY: Alexandria, Virginia.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: Venter is now working on an alternative-energy program—specifically turning algae into ethanol, to be specific—with Exxon Mobil.

FRENEMY: James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA’s double-helix structure. Venter once worked for Watson at the National Institute of Health, but the two famously clashed.

EARLIER LIFE: Venter, 63, was a U.S. Navy medic who served in the Vietnam War.

FULL DISCLOSURE: After cracking the code for his own DNA, Venter published it on the Web.

QUOTE: “I think people should have the option … to take control over [their] own lives, to know what’s coming, so maybe we can alter our genetic fate.”

__YEAR AHEAD:__↑
99. LeBron James

Athlete

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: The N.B.A.’s 24-year-old, six-foot-eight-inch, 250-pound most valuable player, nicknamed “King,” hung out at Herb Allen’s Sun Valley powwow with his buddy Warren Buffett—and intends to become the sporting world’s first billion-dollar brand. Together with high-school chum Maverick Carter, who helps run James’s LRMR Marketing, he’s trying to parlay his endorsements—which have included Nike, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and State Farm—into ownership stakes in companies.

__NEWEST TITLE:__Author. James published Shooting Stars, which he wrote with V.F. contributing editor Buzz Bissinger, in September.

COOL FRIEND: Jay-Z, a mentor to James, has advised him on “brand development.”

UNFINISHED BUSINESS: While he’s considered a contender to become one of the greatest basketball players of all time, James still hasn’t led a team to a championship.

MODEL BEHAVIOR: He’s the first black man to appear on the cover of Vogue.

SHOULD BE EMBARRASSED ABOUT: Nike’s briefly confiscating videotapes showing a college player dunking the ball over him at his basketball camp.

RUMOR HAS IT: Cablevision C.E.O. James Dolan wants to lure James away from the Cleveland Cavaliers, where he has spent the past six seasons, to play for his New York Knicks when the star becomes a free agent.

YEAR AHEAD: ↑
100. Lauren Zalaznick

NBC Universal

NEW ENTRY.

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: One of TV’s most influential curators, Zalaznick runs NBC Universal’s Bravo and Oxygen cable channels and fills both with highbrow takes on lowbrow reality shows: Top Chef,NYC Prep,Real Housewives. One show you can’t see on her networks: Project Runway, which started out on Bravo but has been moved, against the network’s will, to Lifetime.

__PREVIOUS LIFE:__The Brown English Literature and pre-med major spent years in the indie-film world, producing serious fare such as Swoon and Kids.